Enchantment

the time has come for us to understand what these stories mean to us, and to reconnect with the other stories, too,

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

needed to do something active to stop my mind from focusing on my body rather than on what was being said. I needed to write it down, or else to get up and pace the room.

I was certain that this place wasn’t for me. I thought I might achieve my leaving passively, and without anyone feeling too disappointed.

This life I have made is too small. It doesn’t allow enough in: enough ideas, enough beliefs, enough encounters with the exuberant magic of existence.

Lately I can’t read a whole page of a book. It is frictionless, this sliding of attention. I thought it would resolve once the lockdowns ended, but it did not.

It is a strange business, this unlearning. I am not a beginner. I am further back than that, burdened with the work of forgetting what I thought I already knew.

It is a necessary act of anchoring.

When I walk, I fall through three layers of experience.