How Do We Find Enchantment Right Where We Are?
Even When We Long To Be Somewhere Else
Un-fairy Tale Enchantment
My daughter has been enchanted by a book on her shelf going on five years now. Often when we're in between books, she'll reach for it and get lost in it - finding new details in the pictures, re-reading familiar passages but discovering fresh questions to wonder about. It's not an enchanting fairy tale or sweet good night story. It's a history book that takes one piece of land and demonstrates the passage of time by imagining the changes to the land, the structures, and the people on it through the eras from an ancient time to an imagined future. It cycles through periods of relative peace and collective inventiveness interrupted by eras of conquest, empire, war, and plagues. Mostly the latter.
At the kindergarten book fair, she bypassed the prescribed princess stories vying for her attention and I deferred to her innate curiosity that led her to this decidedly un-fairytale book. It pulls no punches. For example, on one page during the black death, if you look closely enough, there's a mother tossing her child out of their city townhouse as a better option to the certain death inside. His body is captured mid-air, his nightgown ballooning around him, his face confused and shocked, but also exhilarated at the possibility of what might come next. Like original fairy tales, it offers no comfort but does spark those three qualities of enchantment I described in this past post: wonder, disorientation, and curiosity.
The Future Page
At the end, there's a hopeful page about what the land might look like in times to come. It imagines a world accommodating our growing density while preserving our need for water, nature, community, and rest. Last week, she looked closely at that page and started ticking off bits and pieces that are already here - drone deliveries and designated digital-free zones to name a couple. We’re both still hoping for that self-cleansing ecosystem built into and around the buildings. To be honest, I don't love the crowdedness of the picture, and the crumbling relic of what began as an ancient prayer site on a hill in the background makes me sad. Yet there's something powerful in watching her track the ways our present is catching up to this imagined future.
Finding Enchantment in Darkness
Enchantment isn't just the arresting wonder of a clear starry night or the spotting of some rare and precious moment of beauty in the natural world. We can be enchanted by the dark, too. There are attractive mysteries there, deep questions without definite answers. I think a lot of us are looking at those depths currently and feeling a lot more lost and overwhelmed than enchanted.
In the book, the same piece of land transforms over time - showing us the resilience and the constant creation and recreation of the people on it. The brutality exists right alongside the hopes and joys that keep people turning to the next page. Perhaps there's not a fix for the anxiety and overwhelm of that darkness, but at least a compass found in wonder about the land we are on.
The Land Beneath Our Feet
Honestly, I feel very little enchantment or connection to the land where I live in Atlanta. If I do feel charmed here, it often has to do with the people, the art, and music, and food. How much color and variety. How fluid and dynamic it all moves here. How many places there are to belong and connect with others. But not the land itself. The land here mostly makes me sad, like looking at the grassy holy site that shrinks and diminishes with each turn of the page in the book. Another tree cut. So much pavement and noise. Too much congestion to make it worth the time and energy it takes to attempt to travel on it.
I long to live in a place where natural landscapes speak directly to the soul, where authentic space isn't something you have to go in search of, but simply exists right under your feet. The land I am on now is not the land that was baked into my ancestors' myths, values, or language. I am so far removed from that, that I hardly know what those are.
I'm not abandoning the dream to live in a place where I feel a stronger connection to the land. My soul craves it and I want to give it the experience of its innocent desires. But believing that I NEED that move to be enchanted by the land I am on, to care for it as if you would tend to a beloved and find wisdom there - that has been a mistake.
Maybe my enchantment with this land can start as wondering. What once existed beneath this pavement, these homes that lined the street? There are still rises and falls in the landscape of this neighborhood and I wonder what formed them, what uses were made of them before we were here? Who lives around here who has a memory of what this land used to look like generations ago and who told them what existed generations before that? What plants still exist here that at one time or another people relied on for survival or medicine or pleasure?
An Invitation to Wonder
My life feels too full right now to embark on a research project into these questions. I hold faith that sometimes questions like these - the ones that come from an innocent yearning to belong and feel whole - only need to be asked. That they have a way of answering themselves over time, appearing in unexpected moments of connection and insight. My MO is to get an idea like this and make it into a whole PhD level project, but I am going to resist that urge, mainly out of a necessity of time and energy right now. The only commitment I can make is to stay open and ready for the answers that come in the form of synchronicity.
We cultivate enchantment, as with any authentic relationship, through bold, compassionate curiosity about the light and shadow of right where we stand, the ground beneath our feet.
Is there a place near you that you feel connected to? What's it like and what's that connection about for you? How do you find wonder in both its light and shadow?
Love,
Tricia
Taking Care
P.S. Next week, I'll be headed into a pretty big surgery and might not be so active on here for a few weeks. If you comment, I may not get to respond for a few weeks, but I promise I’ll read them! I have another post lined up for next week about books as portals to enchantment, (something I’m hoping to experience a lot of while I recover) so stay tuned for that!
Your post made me want to share this poem I wrote with you.
This land is your land.
After the rain smacks glass,
dashes down a brick gutter,
after mulch washes into a wavy berm,
and the hickory tree sheds arthritic fingers,
after milk glass marbles and ladies’ perfume
bottles emerge nicked, and dented, and dirty—
ghosts steam from the strata. The enslaved,
and enlisted, and entitled. The maids,
and cooks, farmers and daughters. Horses
tied to posts, donkeys hitched to wagons
beneath pecan groves. Generations of Muscogee
Creek living, loving, planting, sowing
until excluded, diluted, driven away
from here. From where
their town of Standing Peachtree
became a depot, became a city,
became a fort, became a flame,
became a movie, became a movement
and a march, became a park, a zoo,
a neighborhood with a house and a yard
where I have taken over
with my hostas and hellebores
that grow beneath a long swing
that glides above something tried
and often cruel, never new,
and now deemed mine.
I too love Atlanta for the culture, people, food and events. But the land itself is-- as you said-- trees being cut down, car congestion and more, it can be overwhelming. But I find the joy every day knowing that in Upstate NY where I hail from, it's quieter and I can always return home. Home to rolling hills and the Hudson River Valley that will always be waiting for me with lush, verdant valley views.