Let’s begin again with enchantment: the liberatory gift of wonder
Enchantment
noun
- A feeling of great pleasure; delight
- The state of being under a spell; magic
I’m new to this space and, as way of introduction, I’d like to begin honestly. I won’t say this is a confession but more a hopeful revealing…
I have been writing poems about owls.
A lot of poems about owls. Almost a poem a day about owls.
Many are very short — a haiku or simple sentence. Most often, lately, they are transcriptions (or perhaps more accurately, a translation) of their sounds. There are two who dwell in the same woods in which I dwell, and I often hear their conversation.
Who-who-whoooo-ooooo. Or Broo-brooooroo, broooroooroo.
I cannot resist calling my partner out of the bathroom to press our ears against the screen door when I hear the faintest hoot. My friends and family members are beginning to joke about the obsessiveness of my “owl report,” which consists of the time of the last hooting, how often they may have spoken in one night cycle, or a particularly unique utterance.
One evening, there was a sound like a burbling, angry brook that bubbled out from the trees. A sound I had never before contemplated as an animal sound, yet there it was erupting from a feathered body onto the air, my ears eager to catch it.
When I was a child, I could gaze out my bedroom window for hours. There were four trees outside, one evergreen near the front corner of the house and three young oaks on the side. The twist and turn of oak leaves in the breeze, the wolf-shaped shadow on the sidewalk made by the stiff branches of evergreen in early afternoon — this attention to detail earned me a reputation for being compulsive and spacey or distracted, all at the same time.
“There is a liberating wonderment in enchantment. It belies innocence, by which I mean both vulnerability and a willingness towards that vulnerability.”
As a child given to dream-like states, my perception of the natural world was sensory and expansive. My relationship to it felt, and still feels, as tangible and alive as any relationship I have with human beings. I am not alone in this — many of us reveled in this entranced connection to the world around us when we entered life. We tend to receive most permission for this sense of wonder and enchantment as children, through play and the creative freedom of imagination. Even fettered within various expressions of repression (poverty, war, the ensuing traumas), there are often occasions of wonderment, moments when the imaginal breaks us into a painful and sacred longing towards what might be. These are the moments of yearning for freedom, for peace in the heart, for nourishment, and they point us towards what we need most for our wellbeing.
We begin here, alive with curiosity, and if we are taught that it is acceptable to continue to pay attention, we may hone this skill of open-eyed awareness into an adeptness and faculty for engaging with the more subtle energies of the world, for relating and conversing, for channeling them into magic and healing.
In many versions of the Tarot, the first card of the deck, and thus the beginning of the spiritual journey of transformation, is The Fool. The Fool is often portrayed with childlike innocence, so captivated by something in their surroundings, it appears they are not paying attention and will stroll right off a cliff. Yet it is this very quality of enchanted attention that moves The Fool toward the cliff, the edge of what is known, into a new beyond. The Fool is also referred to as the Universe’s favorite child. The Powers Unseen delight in the delight of The Fool, and so all tools required for the journey through transformation are gifted with generosity and grace.
This heart-centered delight is not a way of being that caste and capitalist cultures tolerate, relying instead on domination, prescription, and exploitation to achieve one’s desires. In these cultures, we are criticized for any way of being that insinuates surrender or potential loss of control. We are expected to “make things happen” and bend the world to our will. Systems of oppression operate most functionally in what witch/writer Lisa Fazio coins, “Predictability Supremacy.” Predictability Supremacy can be conceived of as the tight space of a closed system: rigid and patterned ways of thinking, feeling, and expressing, in which any perceived deviance is severely punished. For me, this is exactly the motivation I need to allow myself to come again into an attentiveness that is earnest and generous. My enchantment — my re-enchantment — with the world as a whole becomes my very resistance against isolation, exploitation, and alienation.
There is a liberating wonderment in enchantment. It belies innocence, by which I mean both vulnerability and a willingness towards that vulnerability. It softens the rigid edges of thinking to make room for play and the seepage of surprise. True transformation, true power, does not exist in a vacuum, but in a space with many other energies, many other beings, many other ways of knowing. The relearning of enchantment activates expansion as we must stretch the container of our perception beyond what is physically and materially known. We make space for revelation to appear.
This is how we enter the transformative arts. This is how we make magic. This is how we heal.
Sometimes the owl poems become long nocturnes. This happens when I hear the owls calling to each other at times of dimming and dawning, at dusk and in the earliest morning light. The sounds at these times have a hollow throated-ness, a roundness like a vessel, as if the calls are curving a space in the air.
These are the times of day when it becomes most apparent our world is turning, that light and dark come and go with a rhythm we are embedded in, encoded with. These are the times I find myself alternatively in easeful appreciation of being present to witness the transition — the sighing sunset, the beckoning sunrise — and discomfited by the shift urging me along to a new state of being. It is time to prepare a way for being in the night. Or, it is time to prepare a way for entering the new day.
These are the times when the owls send out their voices and I stretch my listening for them. The call-and-response of their soundings begin to overlap, creating a rhythm without break. One long, pulsing incantation through the shifting of the light. I stretch, I extend, I become expanded to hear them. I open my hearing to allow as much of the sound as possible. I hold it with wonder, and wait.
