Enchantment

My learning is like the swing of a pendulum, lurching from one extreme to the other, but gradually it begins to stabilise. Fewer and fewer things go wrong. I begin to have insight into what I ought to do.

As a child, I would look out of the window on a nighttime drive and think the moon was following us. From my vantage point, she seemed to be chasing us along the sky, breathlessly trying to keep up. Later I learned it was just because she was so big that it felt like she was everywhere, and that I was small with an outsize sense of my own importanc

The first is all about the surface of my skin, the immediate feedback of my senses.

point. Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things; the sublime is not hiding in distant landscapes. The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It is transformed by our deliberate attention. It becomes valuable when we value it. It becomes meaningful when we invest it with meaning. The magic is of our own co

The people I know are talking about this, too, in their own different ways. They blame the rigours of parenting through a pandemic while still trying to work; they talk about loneliness and isolation, the way it leads them to obsess over things beyond their control; they talk, increasingly, about menopause and the way it fogs their minds. Some are

I am out of charge. I’ve been leaking out energy for too long, and I don’t know how to get it back again.

For my own work, I was left with the early mornings and the battered ends of the day, and—theoretically—Saturdays and Sundays, too.

It will mute your rationality and make you believe in magic.

sea. We as individuals contain it all. We hold within us the potential for the greatest good and the most dreadful evil. We know, intuitively, how each feels, because there are lines traced between us and everything else. I don’t have to believe in God as a person. I can believe in this instead: the entire mesh of existence binding us together in w