What’s to love about an alienated existence on a dead planet? This question is part of a pervasive narrative that lives in the background of all of our lives. A narrative that goes something like this:
Once, the world shimmered.
Now, it is dull and dead.
Once, we were connected to ourselves, living for ideals or heroes we admired.
Now, we live for an individual, disconnected, skeptical, meaningless existence.
Once our collective life operated in a cyclical, seasonal life.
Now, we organize along a linear rationality.
Once, we encountered a supernatural dimension in plants, earth, and sky.
Now, that same encounter slips around us without touching us.
What I’m describing is a state of disenchantment. The philosopher Charles Taylor describes it as “a state where the entire cosmos is drained of meaning and animate vitality”. Drained of freshness. Drained of wonder. Drained of color. J. R. R. Tolkien describes this experience as looking through a grimy glass window out into a drab, grey world.[1] The sociologist Max Weber described it as Die Entzauberung der Welt: “the unmagicking of the world.”
Perhaps we sense this disenchantment when we pull out our smartphone, sense an addiction but don’t want to stop. Or when we realize that our lives are locked in the climate controlled space of air conditioning but we still don’t want to feel the breeze on our skin outside. Perhaps it’s the pull to retreat into the bespoke reality of an Apple Vision Pro while your newborn daughter sleeps on your chest.
So what is enchantment then? The political theorist Jane Bennett describes it as being “struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and everyday” in a way that makes us “both caught up and carried away” simultaneously.[2] In other words, it’s something that we encounter, that hits us. It’s a sense of magic or wonder in the everyday that we feel and the ability to channel it through our minds and bodies. The poet George Herbert described it as ‘heaven in ordinarie.’[3]
Enchantment seems to be easier ‘caught’ than described. Consider your childhood - enchantment seems to come much more easily to children than adults. I remember very clearly the wonder of sitting against a huge oak tree, relishing the cool shade on a sunny summer day. I remember touching the bark of the tree and feeling almost a tingle shoot back into my finger – knowing that this tree was alive as well. As an adolescent I remember sitting against a similar tree and instead thinking about chloroplasts, xylem, and phloem - the mechanics of the tree rather than the tree itself. I could no longer access the same lens, the same perspective that I could as a child.
I wonder if this resonates with you as well. I wonder if deep inside you, there is a longing for the stuff of everyday life to be invested with meaning that sustains, nourishes, and comforts you. I wonder if you (like me) long to be experience wonder and surprise in the midst of a “cynical world of business as usual, nature as manmade, and emotion as the effect of commercial strategy.”[2] I wonder if the modern story - an alienated existence on a dead planet - just doesn’t satisfy. I wonder if, to some irreducible extent, we must become enamored - even enchanted - with our existence and the world around us in order to live lives of meaning and purpose. I wonder if there isn’t a way to go about ReEnchanting Us.
That’s what this website is about – not so much talking about re-enchantment, but rather engaging with the commitments, beliefs, and loves that may put us in-the-way of re-enchantment. This website is about deeply engaging with the world around us with a particular kind of close attention and feeling the sense of contact that emerges from that noticing. I invite you to join me in journeying toward the enchanted heart of things.