Clawing our way to re-enchantment

It wasn't going to settle upon me in a dusting of shimmer-magic simply because I wished upon a star. If I was going to become re-enchanted, I was going to have to claw my way there.

I sent out a first attempt at Letters of Enchantment in the early days of 2021. At the time, I was considering my next thread to pull for my fairy tale and folklore explorations, fresh off of reading Caliban and the Witch for the first time. We were not even a full year into the pandemic, but I was hoping we were past the worst of it (oh, sweet summer child).

Of course, we know that was not the worst of it, and I know I am far from unique in how unmoored I still feel from all that has happened since 2020. Since then, I felt I had become an antithesis. A negative. So disconnected from a sense of what I wanted that my mind had worn grooves based on what I didn't want. Somehow I was at a place of opposition. You can't desire from that place. You can't create from that place. You lose your imagination from that place.

But even the opposition had initially given me a brief gleam of re-enchantment. There I was, at the beginning of what was sure to be a devastating storm. The sirens were blaring, the wind whipping debris painfully into my face, the sky an eerie unnatural green, and when the lightning flashed it momentarily illuminated everything. I saw the threads of the system, the curse — all interconnected, interdependent. Horrifying but artificial, calculated, constructed. Horrifying but clear in this construction that it wasn't inevitable, and actually in the grand scheme of things, it hadn't even existed for that long. Therefore, it could be undone.

So let's do this again.

As I said, my first attempt at these Letters of Enchantment, and the impetus for my greater exploration of enchantment was reading the book Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici.

It's a book that explores the history of the violent transition to Capitalism. There are many threads that make up this history, which range from all sorts of horrors of the enclosures, to the Atlantic Slave Trade, to the Cartesian mechanization of the body, to what Federici argues is the piece least often connected in this context: the European witch trials.

The whole book is a tough read of the makings of the oppressive structures that we live within today, and yet, the piece that knocked the breath out of me was:

"Above all, magic seemed a form of refusal of work, of insubordination, and an instrument of grassroots resistance to power. The world had to be 'disenchanted' in order to be dominated."

To be enchanted is to live with a sense of awe, to see the magic in everything, to feel excitement and wonder and openness and love and imagination and curiosity. To be enchanted is to be human, to relish in the senses, to collaborate, to create, to constantly bend the shape of reality, to be in deep relationship with all that is around you.

Perhaps that's why this line hit me so hard because it succinctly underlined how insidious these coalescing systems were and are. Enchantment is systematically beaten out of us such that the path of least resistance (and survival within this system) is a state of disenchantment.

And that's why I say to become re-enchanted, we have to claw our way there.

Enchantment is the language of fairy tales and folklore, so let me put it this way: All across the land, we are living under a curse. It is the curse of white supremacy, the curse of capitalism, the curse of patriarchy, the curse of religious supremacy, the curse of colonialism. Now, curses are cast. Curses can backfire. Curses are fed. We can be victims of a curse and aid in its power — and a really good curse is cast such that the ones who are cursed do not know they are cursed and are also continuously giving power to the curse itself.

It takes a concentrated effort to break a curse, and for this particular one that is so deeply rooted it throws the illusion of timeless inevitability, we'll be hacking away at it for some time (but it is happening!).

The taproots of this curse seem impossibly deep and large for any one of us to make a meaningful dent. We need big collective action to topple governments and redistribute wealth and develop regenerative relational structures.

But the feeder roots of the curse live in each of us as well. These roots are more delicate, but are named "feeder" because they provide nourishment to the curse. We feed the curse with every shrug of, "It is what it is." With each instance of denying ourselves a connection with nature, community, or our own bodily needs. We allow the curse to spread each time we accept something as absolute truth without questioning who says so and where did that come from? (This is something I discussed in the first episode of Roots of Lore that it's important to ask who is telling the story and why. So what are the stories of this curse? Who benefits from the information these stories tell?)

I feel this desperate, shrieking cry from the depth of my being that we need to figure out a way to claw ourselves back into a state of enchantment. That somehow if everyone became a bit more enchanted, we would stop feeding the curse and maybe it would starve.

It seems so soft. It seems so trivial. Because when the slew of horrors becomes an all-consuming deluge, it's hard to think beyond "Not this! Not this! Not this! Please not this!" All that becomes manageable is baseline survival.

But if not this, then what? If there's no way to imagine something else, there's no way to choose it. We cannot live in the negative. Allowing the imagination to soar beyond constraint and to shape reality is a muscle, but it's also inherently human. It's within all of our abilities. It's a foundation aspect of re-enchantment.

So yes, enchantment is soft. It's the wonder of a sunset. It's the exquisitely articulated expression in a song/dance/piece of art. It's the warm fuzzy feeling of humans coming together for silly spontaneous meaning-making over a hole in the sidewalk shaped like a rat. (Wait now, what's this story about dismissing softness as trivial? Who is telling that story? Who benefits from that narrative?)

Enchantment is also noticing the curse and then making direct eye contact with the curse. Enchantment staring down the things that challenge your worldview under this curse, the things that poke holes in the curse, the things that make you feel squeamish for upholding or believing. Which, yes, can be incredibly painful, and which is why many folks choose the curse over enchantment. The enchanting piece of this is when you see the crack, you notice the curse, and you start to build a sense of self-trust because deep down a part of you knew all along that something didn't quite make sense, didn't you? And if this is just all constructed and then collectively agreed upon as reality, then what else could a re-enchanted people create as a different reality?

More on this to come. I hope you'll stick around. I hope you'll keep your eyes open for the glimmers of your own re-enchantment. And I hope you'll sharpen your nails with me to claw your way back to it.