Rekindling Enchantment
By re-learning how to walk in nature with child-like wonder, our senses fully awakened, we become present in the moment and open to the magic all around us.
Several years ago, I came across a French translation of a lovely little book called A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros. His collection of essays — almost meditations — included poetically titled chapters like “Silences,” “Solitudes,” Gratitude,” and “Freedoms,” along with musings on the walking habits of creative thinkers including Rimbaud, Rousseau, Nietzche, and Thoreau. They, like the author, had found inspiration in rambling and wandering as if every foray into the outdoors was a pilgrimage.
Gros begins the book with a provocative statement: “Walking is not a sport.” It’s really a simple process, he points out: putting one foot in front of the other. No technique involved. Yet walking has been turned into an athletic challenge with the goal of covering as much distance as possible in the shortest amount of time.
In hurrying to get somewhere we miss the most profound gift of walking outdoors — being completely present in the moment. The secret isn’t so mysterious: it’s slowing down. Walking not to get from point A to point B, but to be present, every sense awakened by birdsong, pine scent, sunbeams breaking through the branches, the taste of fresh rain and green grass on our tongue.
For me, such sensory immersion is what rekindles the child-like enchantment I had with the wild places when I was young and exploration was a purpose in itself. I rediscovered this long-lost delight four years ago at the start of the pandemic when quarantining became mandatory.
About two weeks into lockdown, with blue skies and warm temperatures beckoning, I grabbed my grandson for a mask-free adventure and we headed into the woods near his house.
There’s not much I have to say about the pent-up energy of a nine-year-old boy. The taste of freedom and fresh air struck us both with a giddy sense of abandon. My grandson romped through the trees like a forest fairy unleashed — one minute tromping through mud puddles and the next brandishing a fallen branch to fight off an invisible predator.
While I strolled along thinking of my to-do lists and checking my phone, my grandson wandered. At one point, he shouted for me to come look at a tiny garter snake that quickly disappeared into a pile of leaves then dashed off to follow a squirrel darting from tree limb to tree limb. To his eyes, the wild exploded with magic.
His attention, unlike mine, wasn’t on what he had to do later, but on right here. Right now. He was completely present, hands and heart open to all of nature’s gifts, and embracing the moment with joy.
I remembered that feeling. I had grown up in a very small town that offered little for a girl with restless feet and a curious spirit to do except explore. And I did. Up and down the hills, into the woods, through grassy meadows. Those days of finding enchantment in the wild remained embedded in me. I felt an irresistible pull to renew this connection that had felt so wonderous and familiar.
As I refocused my attention, I became more aware of the hidden and unseen nuances all around me. It was early spring with very little new growth and what at first seemed like a monotony of dead things. But the more I intentionally observed, the more the unnoticed details came into view. Empty nests in trees. An oddly discarded office chair. Whisper thin vines with sharp thorns. A patch of daffodils, freshly bloomed.
Only later did it strike me that the arrival of the pandemic had pushed me to embrace the present moment, not by sitting in meditation, but by encountering nature in a deeper, more reflective way by simply slowing down to absorb it. A kind of sensory mindfulness. It was an epiphany.
In coming across Gros’s book recently, I discovered these words that captured my kinesthetic experience precisely. “When we are walking,” Gros writes, “it isn’t so much that we are drawing nearer, more that things out there become more and more insistent in our body. The landscape is a set of tastes, colours, scents which the body absorbs.”
Unexpectedly, the extended quarantine had rekindled my enchantment with nature. The necessity to be somewhere had been temporarily stilled. With no agenda, I learned how to walk again, absorbing the taste of flower nectar, the color of daffodils, and the scent of rain-washed earth.
Elle Harrigan is a contributing writer for the Religious Naturalist Association and hosts the Instagram community @livingwildwisdom focusing on mindfulness, creativity, and spirituality through encounters with nature. A Certified Intuition Practitioner (CIP), she is currently working on a personal growth book that focuses on the power of nature to unleash our inner wisdom.
