Best Quotes from Enchantment by Katherine May with Page Numbers

I wake in the night and a few panicked seconds pass in which I can’t locate myself.

Eventually it releases, the lungs fill, the world floods in.

It is a strange, free-floating moment, an unanchoring of the self.

I increasingly feel that a part of me is missing, the part that is able to sit with the seismic changes that come.

I need to soften, to let go of my tight empirical boundaries, to find a greater fluidity in my being.

The subtle magic of the world offers comfort, but I don’t know how to receive it.

I have lost some fundamental part of my knowing, some elemental human feeling.

Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory.

Without it, I feel I am lacking some essential nutrient, some vitamin found only when you go digging in your own soil.

Enchantment cannot be destroyed. It waits patiently for us to remember that we need it.

The word I reach for the most is discombobulated. It captures perfectly my state of mind: confused, disoriented, out of sorts.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, really. It’s nothing, but it’s also all-encompassing.

Maybe I have stalled. Perhaps I am depressed, but it does not feel like other depressions I have encountered.

Burnout comes when you spend too long ignoring your own needs.

There was a sense that the stones made themselves, finding their expression through her hands.

I don’t want them to be lonely, these small, curious figures.

Resting like this is something active, chosen, alert, something rare and precious.

The stones gave out grace in return for my doubt.

Stone remembers just like clay, but it is we, the humans, who often split at the seams.

I want to feel the weight of my being against my legs, to strain against the endless downward drag.

"The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany."

"I want him to feel dissatisfied in shallow terrains, to crave complexity."

"Deep terrain offers up multiplicity, forked paths, symbolic meaning."

"It will demand your knowledge: the kind of knowledge that’s experiential, the kind of knowledge that comes with study."

"The forest, I believe, will stay with Bert as he ages. It is a deep terrain, a place of unending variance and subtle meaning."

"We live in a world where the sacred has been made rare and elusive, but we still have urges to sanctify parts of our lives."

"Imagine moving through a place where each landmark unpacks its own mythology... transcending the laughter of everyday."

"I want to hand it down to him like an heirloom."

"The urge to imbue places with magical meaning is an innate part of being human."

"Sacred places are no longer given to us, and they are rarely shared between whole communities."

"Take off your shoes when you come home. You do it to keep the floors clean, but also to show how you trust this space to treat you kindly."

"Taking off your shoes is an act of contact, too. You make a direct sensory link to the ground beneath your feet."

"The choice—the act of guiding your attention towards such a tiny thing—is the point."

"Not all that we know is verbal. Much of it—sometimes I think the vast majority—is somatic, the concern of the body."

"To tap into these things—to keep that sense of connection with the world around us, to know through our bodies—we have only to keep practicing that simple contact between our skin and the textures around it."

"We are not passive worshippers. We are not even conduits. We are trying to be superconductors."

"You have to let it crack you open. You have to allow it to expose your beating heart."

"You will need to take care of yourself if you live that way."

"I spent years feeling secretly ashamed that my meditation was forever slipping. I was not devoted enough. I lacked discipline."

"I had to learn to integrate small meditations into busy days, to honor the quality of attention that comes only when you take care of another person’s needs."

I like this. It’s proof of my boldness, my daring.

If I can’t swim to safety, then I will have to climb.

It takes humility to get through a process like this.

If I want to swim better, I need to know nothing—be nothing—for a while.

I’m not learning so much as unlearning.

I need to let go of the part of me that knows better.

I’m further back than that, burdened with the work of forgetting what I thought I already knew.

My learning is like the swing of a pendulum, lurching from one extreme to the other.

Fewer and fewer things go wrong. I begin to have insight into what I ought to do.

I am unlearning all of life, and how I used to live it.

When I want to feel small, I go to the sea at its lowest ebb.

It’s impossible, surely, but it happens like elemental clockwork, so quietly, so gently that you barely notice it.

I’m calculating the volume of water it must take to meet that line, savouring the gut feel of the vast brackish influx that comes twice a day.

A day as we know it is twenty-four hours long, but the moon orbits the earth in twenty-four hours and fifty minutes.

We rarely stop to think that they join us to the entire planet, and to the space beyond it.

I need a stable horizon to which I can anchor myself.

I miss the act of swimming. I miss the belief that my body was capable, that it could endure.

I want to let something break in me, some dam that has been shoring up this shamefully atavistic sense of the magic behind all things.

I want to retain what the quiet reveals, the small voices whose whispers can be heard only when everything falls silent.

And here I am, remembering.

It is an extraordinary sight, this place where people have come across the ages in the hope of healing.

What do I think I’m performing—some kind of baptism?

You must confront your own yearning to make meaning.

Ritual gives us something to do with our hands rather than our heads.

Once you’re there, you’re on your own.

I think grimly that I might need to make quite a few loaves in the coming weeks.

We offer what we can find to the well.

It was the simple work of willing hands, an act of listening.

I just need to make contact with a place that holds a residue of hierophany.

Talking to God does not require faith, but practice.

We have let the sea show us a fragment of its power, and in return, we’ve shown it our power and our will and our sheer exuberant joy.

I’m willing to exhaust myself trying.

I crave being part of a congregation, a group of people with whom I can gather to reflect and contemplate.

That only makes the imperative greater. We have a duty to witness the broad spectrum of humanity.

Witnessing made the past events more complex and the present ones more pressing.

I am allowed to make what I want of my own two hands.

The gesture is mine to offer, and I trust that it will be understood.

I learned to place my hands together in prayer, in greeting, in a bow of respect.

I swim to enter into the midst of something that joins me to everything, everywhere, in all time.

Between water and our bodies there is effortless communication, both engaged in an endless saturated exchange.

the whole firmament appeared to be in motion with them, as if the planets and constellations were falling from their places.

It was as though a curtain had been drawn back to reveal the truth—known, but never really understood—that the earth is a ball floating through the vastness of space.

Here was enchantment, falling like rain on expectant rooftops, demanding attention and making the humans below wonder about the relatedness of all things.

Nostalgia gathered around them for me like residual magic, like hierophany.

If I had my way, I would reinstate the old Army & Navy department store... and the way she would reach into her apron to pull out her notepad.

In a quiet place where nothing much happened, this was a spectacle worth witnessing, pulling us all out together in the dark.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

We are more moth than we know: small, frustrated, capable of only tickling a world that we wish would feel our heft.

Fire is the shadow side of enchantment, the dark, gleaming sorcery from which we can’t tear our gaze.

Without it, we are living only a surface existence, a shallow terrain.

I cannot complete a whole chapter without my consciousness excusing itself and quietly retreating into an inner sanctum to which I have no access.

We are not looking for anything, we are just looking.

Everywhere I’ve been this week has set on fire.

You should pay attention when things like that happen. It might mean something.

To have nothing to lose, you have to first lose everything.

This humbling was like water poured over fire. I started from scratch, and it was surprisingly enjoyable to do so.

How have I allowed this great pleasure in my life—the act of sitting quietly with a book and drinking in its words—to become so heavy, so freighted with obligation?

She offered me instead the act of knowing, rather than the static fact of the known, a lifetime of enquiry.

I want to keep on going deep into the uncertain act of making, to see the unknown world stretch out before me.

The next world is so tantalising, lying across a million unread pages, and in which I am nothing, nobody, new.

Play is serious. Play is absolute.

It is a form of symbolic living, a way to transpose one reality onto another and mine it for meaning.

Deep play is a labyrinth and not a maze, a twisting path with no destination.

The most beautiful reaches of your attention degrade within you, leaving behind a residue of bitterness and frustration.

We should teach this to our children.

Every moment was worth it.

Your only reward is more of the same—more wells to fill with your attention, more fires to tend.

What matters is that we play at all, that we nurture that particular quality of attention.

It was the labour of years, of faltering, incremental, obscure work.

Your craft will die if you don’t nurture it.

Sometimes we are visited by destruction. Other times, it seems, the world flexes its claws and lets us feel its hot breath, just to remind us how small we are, how helpless.

A change is coming, whether or not I am paying attention.

I hope we can all rise above the urge for petty revenge.

To merge again, somehow. To melt back into the landscapes that hold us.

Change is the restless bedrock on which we’re founded.

Perhaps this is what I’m seeking, too, the ability to step into the world’s flux, to travel with it rather than rasping against it.

We are not the passive recipients of the numinous, but the active constructors of a pantheon.

We make the change, and it makes us.

How do we meet this kind of God, this irresistible force that roars through our existence like a hurricane? We adapt.

Whatever happens—whatever I do—all this will be ash in the morning.

An orange cuts through nausea like a scalpel, even if the effect is only temporary.

Flying feels like an intermission in the real business of living.

The human body is mistrustful of falls, and so we brace all the same.

The air is full of information. We just have to find the right way to listen.

They stand now as relics, a discarded technology, really known only by word of mouth.

There is so much, always, that we don’t see. There is so much that we don’t hear.

I can visit them and be quiet for a while, loving the smooth brutality of their concrete.

Life was infused into the fabric of the building, even as its owner faded out.

I saw it as a therapy.

Air brings in the new.

Sublime landscapes are liminal spaces that divorce us from the comfortable everyday and take us to the edge of understanding.

The glory itself is the effect of light refracting through water droplets in a similar way to a rainbow.

We can know exactly how these phenomena operate and still be swept away by their unearthly qualities.

We have Western accounts of Brocken Spectres dating back nearly three hundred years, and in nearly every single one of them, the witness comes to ask how, in the material world, this effect was created.

We’ve jettisoned our capacity to accommodate the complex interplay of symbolic and rational thought, the scientific and the enchanted.

We are deep into the kind of fluid, winding chatter that draws together all of heaven and earth anyway.

I have found something to set free in all this billowing air.

If beings as marvellous as Brocken Spectres can be projected onto fog, then perhaps it can also serve as a screen onto which I can cast the flickering new self that I have been imagining.

Brocken Spectres show me how to tread the horizon between blunt rationality and the spiralling interpretations that might lift it into greater meaning.

It now seems to me that we humans have capacity for more: for another layer of experience, for an extra depth of understanding.

I needed to write it down, or else to get up and pace the room.

Writing, for me, is a way of making the airy matter of thought feel real.

Most of it is muscle memory.

When we know the detail of the places we inhabit—when we tend them with our own hands and walk them with our own feet—we enter into a conversation with our places that is mutually nourishing.

It would be selfish not to pass it on.

However, he had to allow his students a concession he’d never been allowed: to write everything down.

If we start to re-enchant the most fundamental parts of our existence—the food, the objects that we use, the places we inhabit—we can begin to restore our connection between our bodies and the land.

I want to take it slowly, to absorb my lessons through the skin and the ears, to sometimes get stung.

Handle them respectfully, and they’ll know you’re not a threat.

Here, in this moment, an understanding is captured: of the world as it tastes to a bee.

It reminds me a lot of om, the single syllable from which the universe is created.

The alchemy comes in understanding the truth that seems so easily hidden: that everything is interconnected.

We as individuals contain it all. We hold within us the potential for the greatest good and the most dreadful evil.

Each one of us contains it all.

We often prefer to forget it. We often push back against it. But it is there, real as sunlight, behind everything we do.

Perhaps that is what we’re meant to do: remake our stories until we finally find the one that fits.

Those who buy them are in awe of the delicate orbs of their seed heads and admire the bounty of a plant whose leaves and petals are both edible.

What is invisible in one place is beautiful in another.

When we tell the stories of the things that inhabit our land, we help newcomers to read the deep terrain around them and perhaps to feel a little more at home.

Storytelling is always an exchange: when we listen to what is told to us, we enrich our mythology.