Gratuitous Re-Enchantment as Surthrival Strategy

For the past twelve months, I’ve been hosting a peculiar little celebration.

Each month, I invite people to tune into a different more-than-human kin or elemental presence. We’ve celebrated Pollinators and Soil, Sun and Moon, Water and Fire, Darkness and Decomposers, Fungi and Feathered Fiends, and the often overlooked Smalls. I have been calling it Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Day, though it really is in invitation to daily practice.

Twelve months of astonishments, where we allow a little more of our attention to return to the living world. Where a little more of our capacity for wonder escapes the apparatus of distraction and extraction. A little more of our estranged mammal selves re-members that we belong to a world of magnificent, bewildering, and gratuitous aliveness.

Of course, the world itself has never needed re-enchanting.

Nor has all of humanity forgotten. Indigenous and other land-rooted cultures have long cultivated ways of knowing, relating, and belonging that the dominant culture of (patho-adolescent) Modernity has worked so hard to suppress and destroy. Re-enchantment is hardly some new discovery.

Mushroom people have not been waiting for us to recognize their marvelous metabolisms. Rivers have never stopped speaking their liquid languages. Lichens have been quietly complicating the categories of individuality for hundreds of millions of years.

No, it is a certain strand of world-making, cultured in the peculiar petri dish of Modernity, that has become dangerously disenchanted.

Or perhaps more precisely, enchanted by the wrong stories. By stories that serve systems of domination and destruction.

Stories of separation. Supremacy. Endless growth. Earth as resource, body as machine, value as productivity, the living world as backdrop to the grand human drama.

The practice of re-enchantment requires a corresponding practice of disenchantment. Modernity has not eliminated enchantment so much as rechanneled it toward destructive mythologies. Mythologies that we are trained to accepts as “objective,” inevitable, and natural.

But what passes for realism, or “just how the world is” might simply be a particularly successful—nefarious—enchantment.

The flip side of the lichened log of enchantment is to become generatively disenchanted with the slime mold stories Modernity has handed us. (though that is unfair to slime mold, which are stunningly mysterious beings)

To fall more deeply in love with the living world, we simultaneously are invited to cast off the spell of our inherited scripts that have taught us to forget our interdependence and embeddedness in the animate web of life.

Fortunately, we turn over the lichened log of enchantment and find the decomposers already at work.

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A Year of Astonishments

I’ve been reflecting on the things I’ve learned over the past year.

Yes, learning about buzz pollination and the incredible 3000-mile pilgrimage of the Monarch butterfly blew my mind. My inSPORation (thanks Peter McCoy, author of The Mycocultural Revolution: Transforming Our World with Mushrooms, Lichens, and Other Fungi) from our fungi friends and lichen queendom has deepened considerably.

Yes, knowing that our Star (the Sun) sheds hot plasma and solar wind at nearly a million miles an hour and Moon has moonquakes made me appreciate how little I knew about these most familiar of cosmic siblings.

And discovering that Limacology is the specialized branch of zoology that focuses on the scientific study of slugs (of my favorite small ones) is neat. (though why not SLIME-ology? lol)

But something more consequential happened along the way.

It was tuning into my avian soundscape more intentionally that transformed my relationship to place. Not just knowing the names of Pacific wren and Swainson’s thrush, but letting their song enter into me as a way of belonging.

Coming to “see” the unseen multitudes in Soil, serving literally and metaphorically as the ground of our existence, and the invisible relationships present in every bite of food. (Thank you, pollinators!)

Perhaps the most surprising revelation was how gratitude changed not just how I approached the life around and within me, but my entire orientation.

It was the practice of arriving at River with gratitude before taking anything that began to change me. Before drinking, swimming, gathering, or asking anything of her, simply arriving in relationship.

I began by giving a little water back to growing beings at each new place I visited. Over time, the practice evolved into placing my hands on every body of water I encountered, with a simple whisper: “May you flow where you need to flow. Thank you.”

It became such a habit that a couple of weeks ago, as I was leaving a campsite, I realized I’d forgotten my practice. I had to turn around and conduct a little ritual of gratitude.

Something felt unfinished.

It just seemed good manners.

And it made me a more humble citizen of her flow.

That orientation gradually began to carry through to other aspects of my life. Intimacy with water became a template for other relationships.

Being enchanted and grateful, there was no room for extraneous desire. For a moment, nothing more was needed. Presence emptied past and future and brought me face to bee-face with the moment.

I’m sure there are neuroendocrinological correlates to all this, but simply put:

I was here.

I was really here.

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Every WOW Brings a Hungry Ghost Home

The year became twelve (really, daily) invitations to interrupt the machinery of the ordinary and say WOW with our whole bodies.

I have a theory that every time we say WOW with our whole bodies, a hungry ghost comes home. And Empire (the disembodied energy of domination, separation, and extraction) is deprived of 100 calories of necro-political fuel.

The ghost is the insatiable appetite cultivated by systems organized around perpetual dissatisfaction, fed in part (I would argue) by our accumulated and untended traumas. Wonder doesn’t simply oppose this appetite. It offers another species of nourishment, one that makes the ghost less hungry.

In other words, relentless roving and grasping and its manifest death-spiral politics, is slowly replaced with being-at-home in our bodies, mind, and spirit.

Empire runs on extraction and not-enoughness. The living world offers extravagant generosity. Which metabolism are we feeding?

So Enchantment is not mere whimsy but an psycho-spiritual immune response.

When wonder dries up, Empire grows. When wonder flourishes, the apparatus of extraction and distraction loses some of its hold on us. There are fewer calories for it to consume.

Not wonder as in stunned or numbed by technological entertainment, endlessly consuming spectacles engineered to capture our attention.

But wonder that enlivens us through direct encounter with the AWE-full animacy of the web of life.

Enchantment becomes a counter-spell.

In these ways, Enchantment is liberatory. Not one that magically dismantles systems of domination, but one that makes their spells less likely to take hold. One that nourishes us, from cells to spirit, to imagine and enact other possibilities. To build relationships and communities capable of resisting and dismantling omnicidal systems.

Perhaps this is part of what it means to become beautiful barbarians: to grow increasingly ungovernable by the stories of Empire, and more deeply answerable to Life.

We receive and revel in beauty not as escape, but as nourishment. Nutrient-thick, ancient, grounding.

Is it too much to say that we need beauty? We require awe?

Consider how liberatory it can be to reclaim our alignment with natural cycles, the pace of our bodies, and the wisdom of the dark season, rather than submitting to the perpetual productivity demands of Empire.

How it is liberatory to relate to water as kin and relative, rather than merely a resource to be managed, owned, or extracted.

Water, indeed, is Life.

How it is liberatory to come into deep connection to multitude of Whos of our landscape, not for what they can do for us, but for their own sake.

To become gratuitously enchanted is to recover relationships beyond utility, deservedness, and exchange.

A great blue heron doesn’t need to increase GDP. A rainbow doesn’t need to prove its worth or improve our productivity. Moon doesn’t need a 5-year plan.

They don’t have to earn their belonging through usefulness or consumption.

And neither do we.

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A Yes-in-the-Darkness

A commitment to a wondrous orientation in no way displaces grief, nor relieves us of the work of tending the darkness of the times we’re living through.

In fact, wonder can intensify grief.

The more intimately we know and love the living world, the more acutely we may feel what the systems we’re living inside are destroying. Enchantment can deepen our kinship, and kinship can intensify our felt sense of responsibility.

In Watershed, I’ve explored grief as something we need not—nor are able to—carry alone, but are invited to lend back to the larger living world. Wonder and grief, I’ve come to believe, are not opposing currents. They belong to the same watershed of our love and deep belonging.

It is important to acknowledge that the capacity to access awe is not equally available under conditions of violence, exhaustion, and survival. There is no obligation to feel grateful in the face of difficulty, let alone atrocity.

Nor should re-enchantment become another demand placed upon those already carrying unbearable burdens.

Rather, I understand this orientation as part of cultivating and protecting the conditions in which life, in all its dimensions, can flourish. Conditions that make room for rest, play, curiosity, beauty, belonging, and enchantment.

Including, and especially, for those at the receiving end of Empire’s most brutal consequences, from whom such conditions are being violently stolen.

To say Yes to Life is not a Yes to the arrangements that are destroying it. Quite the opposite.

Our be-wondered selves become more capable of saying a holy NO to the systems that would have us numb out, turn away, or surrender our capacity to imagine otherwise.

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The Festival of Slow Surrendering

Robert Macfarlane, author of Is a River Alive?, said in an interview with Emergence Magazine:

“Wonder is an essential survival skill in the Anthropocene.”

I agree. And I’d nudge it an inchworm step further: Wonder and enchantment are prerequisites for fully inhabiting Life.

They are ways of purposely and gently sabotaging the arrogance that seems to animate Homo Supremicus.

A way to sneak vitality back into the nervous system like a quiet, ecstatic fungus. Like a reverse Cordyceps (inspiration for the series The Last of Us), not parasitizing its host toward death, but pollinating us toward animacy, reminding us that we never stopped being part of the Grand Metabolism.

We are not practicing enchantment merely to survive the Great Unraveling/Great Re-membering. We are practicing it to surthrive: to nourish for all the capacities for belonging, beauty, reciprocity, resistance, and flourishing that Empire would have us forget.

If we pitch our Strange Curiosities Tent at the Festival of Slow Surrendering, at the feet of 100-year-old sunburst lichen or Elder Fire’s crackling wisdom, we are less likely to be lured by the siren songs of techno-solutionism and manipulations by politicians invested in maintaining the status quo.

Curiosity and wonder become solvents that soften the hard casing around the heart. That allows us to melt back into permeability, making us more available to the world, and to the transformations it asks of us.

Let us practice becoming rearrangeable by awe and delicious bafflement.

Let us be astonished enough to remember our belonging and grateful enough to act on it towards collection liberation and future of mutual thriving.

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If you’d like to join these monthly celebrations of kinship, wonder, and gratitude, you can explore past issues and sign up for future dispatches here.

November marks the beginning of your second annual cycle, with the Decomposers and Detritivores, who are forever making a meal of yesterday.