If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention

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

She wants readers to adopt and embody an ethos that makes room for the vitality of matter. In her view, it’s a useful attitude. “Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy or inspiration to enact ecological projects,” she writes. We might find it hard to “contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously t

There’s always an urge among writers To turn fleeting observations and momentary glimpses Into metaphors and “material” as quickly as possible, As if every perception ended in a trope, As if the writer were a dynamo Turning the world into words. The goal is the opposite: To get your words, your phrases, As close as you can to the solidity, The mate

magic. Awareness feels like that. It is the realization you aren’t a muggle in a hum-drum world but a wizard in a mesmerizing one. It is the discovery of enchantment where you thought there was none.