Nature Speaks

Enchantment is not spectacle. It does not depend on rare events or mystical visions. It asks only that we attend differently.

In Enchantment: Wonder in Modern Life, cultural historian Patrick Curry calls enchantment “a small, fragile, renewable joy.” It cannot be commanded or manufactured. It is a way of being touched by something beyond our will, without needing to own or explain it.

Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary, describes two broad modes of attention. One seeks control and certainty; the other is open, curious, and relational. “The right hemisphere,” he writes, “yields a world of individual, embodied beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies.” Enchantment belongs to this receptive way of knowing, where meaning is allowed to emerge rather than be imposed.

Carl Jung explored a similar idea in his Collected Works: the psyche longs for connection with what he called the Self, something larger and deeper than the ego. Symbols, myths, and dreams speak in this register. Enchantment arises where inner meaning and outer world meet.

Writers and artists have long intuited this. Rainer Maria Rilke urged us, in Letters to a Young Poet, to “learn to see” – to look inwardly until what is invisible becomes visible. Mary Oliver, in Dream Work, invites us to find “your place in the family of things.” Lewis Hyde, in The Gift, writes that creativity depends on receptivity to what comes unbidden, calling it “the labor of gratitude.” David Abram, in The Spell of the Sensuous, describes this participatory knowing as a “reciprocal spell” between ourselves and the more-than-human world.

Philosopher Charles Taylor observes in A Secular Age that modern life is marked by “disenchantment,” where meaning is often reduced to mechanism. Yet our longing for depth persists. “The hunger for meaning,” he writes, “has not disappeared but takes new forms.” Enchantment is one of those forms – not irrational, but a widening of reason to include wonder.

Christophe André, in Mindfulness: 25 Ways to Live in the Moment Through Art, speaks of small pauses of attention: looking slowly, listening without agenda. Such moments allow us to rediscover the depth that habit conceals.

What these voices share is an insistence that meaning is not something we fabricate alone. It emerges when we meet the world with humility and openness. Enchantment is fragile because it depends on this posture; it is renewable because its sources are always near.

To speak of enchantment is not to ask for the extraordinary. It is to remember, as Patrick Curry notes, that “wonder is both ordinary and essential.” It is an attitude, a practice, and perhaps a quiet resistance in an age of speed and utility.

Enchantment suggests that life is more than what we can measure or master. It asks us not to withdraw from the world but to meet it differently. And in a time when so much feels flattened, this shift of attention may be one of the most radical acts we can make.