The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life

The soul is always searching for itself, and it takes great pleasure when it finds itself mirrored in the material world. When we look at a stunning sunrise, we are seeing the beauty of our own body, for it is in the mystery of birth we have risen out of this earth. Sunrise offers us a new day and a hopeful glimpse of renewal and resurrection.

The idea that the very purpose of life is to become more healthy and achieve a higher level of consciousness seems so embedded in modern thought that it's rarely questioned. A reverential attitude toward the life we've been given is more important than living that life correctly, successfully, or healthfully.

For many, the enchanted life remains elusive because of deep feelings of insecurity. The theologian Paul Tillich often wrote about this cultural anxiety as an aspect of being itself: "This anxiety is aroused by loss of a spiritual center, of an answer, however symbolic and indirect, to the question of the meaning of existence." I myself have long felt the dilemma of looking for meaning, and therefore relief from the cultural anxiety, either in a mental understanding of life and culture or in plain emotion. But now I formulate the issue differently: the fundamental anxiety can be relieved more by a 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘧𝘶𝘭 life than by any quest for meaning, and life itself becomes meaningful when we discover its interiority, its soul, its capacity to entrance and enchant. Enchantment is valuable not only for its own sake and for the pleasures and dread it can inspire but also because it takes us away from ordinary, habitual ways of seeing. It allows us to stand outside life and then return to it with a fresh perspective and with precious knowledge that is not available in ordinary states of awareness.

Scholar and Philosopher Marsilio Ficino says we should draw spirit and soul down 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 a thing, not away from it. In what could be a definition of enchantment, he says, "Everywhere the world is alive and breathes, and we can absorb its spirit." If the world is indeed everywhere alive and breathing, then each place is unique, with personality and character. If we do our part by being open to the enchantment, it can awaken our souls, and we may feel charmed and deeply stirred simply by making ourselves present to it. Travel and visit places that are rich in soul, he advises. Honor local spirits — not only your own but your neighbors' and those most foreign to yours.

We could learn from the alchemists to appreciate processes of corruption and decay. As things become ruins, they go through a natural alchemy in which their soul is revealed, a falling apart and entropy as important to life as growth and expansion. Ruin and renovation are like yin and yang, an interweaving in which one thread affects and influences the other. In ruins we can celebrate life and find hope, while in new building and making we can from the very beginning sense inevitable decay and dilapidation. Every soulful moment and act requires this embrace of the living and the dying, and only an anxious heart is incapable of enjoying its dance.

Decay, corruption, falling apart, memory, traces of the past — these are all aspects of life that are with us every day. They may hint at failure, ignorance, or some other imperfection, but they are a significant dimension of all kinds of life, including our own interior experience. Ruins are an endangered species today because in a materialistic worldview they don't appear to have any relevance; yet from a spiritual point of view, they are irreplaceable containers of the spirit of family, ancestors, and time itself. Get rid of ruins, and we lose the guidance offered by memory. We wander around untethered to the past and carried, anxious and unconscious, toward a floating future.

Nothing is more magical than watching [an] infant grow into a person as the soul emerges gradually and shows itself in the individuality of a new being. I don't think for a moment that a child is a 𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘶𝘭𝘢 𝘳𝘢𝘴𝘢, an empty page that life experiences and culture makes into a person. Clearly, a child is fully present in that moment of birth, and what happens later is simply an unfolding and unwrapping of a complicated and rich destiny and potentiality. Psychologist James Hillman says a child is an acorn and that you can see the seeds of its life early on: "You have an acorn in you, you are a certain person, and that person begins to appear early in your life, but it's there all the way through your life."

Although nature is usually thought of as the quintessential example of the material world, paradoxically nature gives us the most fundamental opening to spirit. Mountains, rivers, and deserts, enjoying a lifetime far exceeding our own, give us a taste of eternity, and an ancient forest or gorge reminds us that our own lives are brief in comparison. In nature, we become sensitive to our mortality and to the immensity of the life that is our matrix, and both of these sensations, mortality and immensity, offer the foundation for a spiritual life. For all our well-equipped investigations and classifications, nature remains full of mystery: The farther the physicist explores the subatomic world, the more mysterious nature appears; and the more pictures we receive from beyond our solar system, the more it inspires awe and wonder. By confronting us with irreducible mysteries that stretch our daily vision to include infinity, nature opens an inviting and guiding path toward a spiritual life.

It's difficult to imagine being busy and enchanted at the same time. Enchantment invites us to pause and be arrested by whatever is before us; instead of our doing something, something is done 𝘵𝘰 us. This is the way of the soul, which is primarily the receptive power in us; by letting ourselves be slowed down and affected by nature, we are fashioned into persons of substance, even if at a more active, conscious level we are forcefully engaged in becoming something else. If busyness is an emotional complex, then it's likely that when we are busiest, we are doing least. We can be extremely active without being busy, and busy without accomplishing anything. It's important to be heroic, ambitious, productive, efficient, creative, and progressive, but these qualities don't necessarily nurture the soul. The soul has different concerns, of equal value: downtime for reflection, conversation, and reverie; beauty that is captivating and pleasuring; relatedness to the environs and to people; and an animal's rhythm of rest and activity. The beauty of nature's spirituality lies in its complete resolution of the problem of mind and body, spirit and matter.

Everyone [should] turn toward the mystery of his own nature the way a sunflower turns toward the sun. In all things, even in the most recondite mysteries of the soul, nature is the first and finest of teachers. Although nature is usually thought of as the quintessential example of the material world, paradoxically nature gives us the most fundamental opening to spirit. Mountains, rivers, and deserts, enjoying a lifetime far exceeding our own, give us a taste of eternity, and an ancient forest or gorge reminds us that our own lives are brief in comparison. In nature, we become sensitive to our mortality and to the immensity of life that is our matrix, and both of these sensations, mortality and immensity, offer the foundation for a spiritual life.