For the first two months of this year, I was ill. I don’t mean the kind of ill that you can soldier on through, sniffing as you go. I mean properly, cancel-everything-and-take-to-your-bed ill. I was not sure when I would feel well again, and that was a problem because I had a book that was about to be published – a book about rekindling awe, wonder and fascination. I could barely stand up, let alone hold a thought in my head. Those soft emotions felt very far away.
But in my experience, Enchantment, my new book, always was intended for dark times, rather than easy ones. It emerged from the depths of the pandemic, when successive lockdowns had left me so burnt out that I felt as though I’d ground to a halt. Time looped and skipped, and my mind seemed unable to rest on the most simple activities, like holding a conversation or filling out a form. Worst of all, I lost my ability to read for pleasure. My solace and retreat, the place I turn to when I want to escape into the world of stories and ideas, was gone. It was as though desire itself had left me. I wondered if I’d ever be able to find it again.
In that time, I dreamed of mountains. I had never been much drawn to them before, but they suddenly seemed like everything I needed: grand and sweeping, overwhelming in their beauty but at the same time able to speak of hardship and struggle against the elements. This seemed cruel, because for the first time in my life I was forbidden to travel to them. I was craving awe – physically needing it, like a vitamin – and being denied it. It was a small thing amid the horrors of that time; nevertheless I felt that I was being denied my own healing. Every part of me wanted to go out on an expedition to absorb the enormousness of the world.
One night, when I was sleepless enough to pad downstairs in search of a crossword, I decided to step outside for a few moments to see if the moon was visible above the rooftops. And there she was, bright and gibbous, surrounded by a drift of clear stars. Bathing in that pale light, I realised that I had been a fool to pine after mountains. I had access to abundant awe, three footsteps from my back door. There, stretching across the sky, was Orion, the first constellation I’d learned to identify. There was Mars, slightly red to the naked eye. And there was I, a tiny speck in a vast universe with an inflated sense of my own self-importance.
Awe has always been available to us. It’s an artefact of our own attention, rather than a force that emanates from magnificent things. It is perpetually nearby, but we like to imagine that it’s far away, a place that we visit on once-in-a-lifetime holidays, rather than a practice that we can foster across a lifetime. I’ve tended to see it as a frippery, an unnecessary decoration on the edges of experience that I can safely afford to ignore most of the time. I no longer think that’s true. Instead, I think that those vulnerable, ground-shifting encounters like awe, wonder, fascination and mystery are crucial to our survival.
It wasn’t just the pandemic that had brought my brain to a standstill. It wasn’t simply the weight of home schooling and the bitter fight for time to work against a husband who had colonised my desk. It was the product of years of dislocation, years of living in a world that felt cruel and conflict-ridden, years of watching a slow apocalypse unfolding, and feeling helpless to stop it. Or perhaps that’s not quite it. After all, human life might have always felt like this. The problem is that we’re enduring this in a disenchanted age, when all of the magic has seeped away from our understanding. We’re no longer fluent in the language of folklore and mythology. We’re rejecting the spaces in which we once worshipped, reflected and congregated. We’ve come to see ourselves as profoundly separate from the landscapes we inhabit, as superior beings who do things to the world, instead of being woven into it. When we speak of nature, we mean “not us”. Bereft of the beliefs and practices that once sustained us, we’re left picking over the carcass of our human experience.
I’d spent my adult life pushing my sense of enchantment away, denying its calling because I saw myself as a rational being who didn’t need such things. Without it, I was unable to make meaning as I aged, to feel any faith in this planet and its inhabitants as everything changed. But there was a yearning still there in me, a persistent, insurgent desire to connect and engage in shifting acts of understanding. The input of my own senses so often told me that there was something more to this life than the mere observable facts. If this was a spiritual longing, then it was also political: I did not want to follow arcane rules set down by distant patriarchs. And I refused to believe that enchantment was only available to those who could travel to far-flung places, led by expensively procured gurus. If enchantment mattered, it had to be democratic. It had to be the business of real life.
When sickness arrived at my doorstep in January, it was deeply familiar, and not just because I’m used to contending with chronic illness. Something about the uncertainty of that time – the constant state of wondering when and if it would end – reminded me of that anxious first year of the pandemic, when the world felt remade in a new and incomprehensible shape. There was a state of mind, too, that was particular to that time. I drifted in and out of sleep in a perpetual twilight of stasis and drawn curtains. I lost my sense of night and day, and cursed my inability to do simple things.
But the difference, this time around, was that I had now been practising enchantment for long enough to know that I could find it close by, and all around me. At night, when I was feverish and wandering, the moon was still there. I could step outside to see her, and be soothed in her constant, silvery light. Sometimes, the most I could do was to squint at her through a crack in the window. But that was something. It was, in fact, a small taste of everything. It was beautiful, and timeless enough to put me back into context again.
In those cold months, I listened to the birdsong gradually returning, to the sparrows finding their way back into the nesting box I erected for swifts, to the robin singing its silvery thread into the dawn. When I had the energy, I watered my plants, clipping away their dead leaves, and using them to mulch the soil. I noticed as they began to put on new growth, tender and bright green, and I admired their survival in the face of my neglect.
A single crocus sprang up in the middle of my garden, and it felt like a miracle. I certainly didn’t plant it, and I’ve been in this house for 17 years now. A part of me wanted to see it as a mysterious gift that showed me how life finds a way again, despite the odds. A different part of me wanted to understand the biology of crocus bulbs, to research how long they can survive under the soil and how they spread. I found that I could hold both kinds of knowing at once, without much conflict. It was like slipping between different layers of a well-made bed.
My phone from that time is full of photographs of my bathroom window, which hosts a spotted begonia and a candle. At certain times of day, the light shone through the plant’s red leaves and made them glow like stained glass. At other times, I lit the candle and admired its glow against the darkening evening. Sometimes, sunlight would glance through the glass at a certain angle and project a small, crisp-edged rainbow on to the opposite wall. All of the ancient elements were right there in my bathroom: soil, water, fire and air. All of them were spaces in which to contemplate.
I began to feel a little better again, and a halting walk down to the beach – which usually takes me four minutes, but now took 15 – revealed a riot of fresh colours, as if the world was entirely new. Or perhaps I was the one who was new. I felt as tender-leaved as my plants, moved by the exuberance of the strangers who rushed past me, exhilarated by the sight of friends who I’d only known through text messages in the preceding months.
There was enchantment in all of it. Even in the long, dark nights, there was connection, and a sense of my place in the fabric of humanity, the weft of nature. My sense of enchantment sustained me through difficulty, but it, in turn, was fuelled by the empty, intimate space that opened up in those months. There is an exchange here that I’ve learned to carve: the binding of a small life to a vast universe. The way that the insignificant can speak of the whole.
Enchantment: Reawakening Wonder in an Exhausted Age is published by Faber
