A Grief Spell for Cultivating Enchantment in Disenchanting Times
+ an invitation to mid-week enchantment practice
Dear Shapeshifters,
I’m starting a new practice called “midweek enchantments”. Maybe it will have a better name at some point but that’s it for now.
Each Wednesday, I’ll try to do some writing about enchantment and share one-several things I’m feeling enchanted by.
It’s actually not so new a practice - but it’s one I’m trying to bring into this space.
Perhaps you remember my viral meme dumps where I wrote the words “in the mood to be fucking enchanted” over paintings of bored looking Victorian women (and eventually all kinds of images), followed by a bunch of snippets of beautiful or silly images and videos. I was surprised that so many people seemed to adore these posts. They tickled something in me to make and they seemed to tickle something in others.
Not everyone though.
I remember one time someone commented “wow how many times can you put the same words on different images” or something like that, clearly un-enchanted with my meme making and tired of my bullshit.
But, the answer was A LOT of fucking times.
Why?
I think because it struck something for people.
Many of us genuinely want to feel in love with the beauty and magic of this world. We don’t want to wake up feeling like shit and clawing ourselves out of despair. We want to feel in touch with the preciousness of our lives, the incredible strange magic of being a part of this universe among universes. We want to experience the beauty of the big and small. We want to feel connected, powerful, together. We want to feel alive.
It’s not always within reach. But we can still decide to keep reaching for it, to keep fanning its flames.
Mid-week Enchantments is going to be one place I practice fanning those flames. I hope you’ll join me and share your own weekly enchantments in the comments or just track your own enchantments and share them with your people because we need all of them 💞
What is enchantment?
When I use the word enchantment, I mean a bunch of things…
I mean a sense of curiosity, imagination, delight, pleasure, wonder, and awe in the ways we sense ourselves, the world, and what’s possible.
I mean a more deeply embodied sensing of the life, animacies, and worlds around us that colonialism and capitalism seek to flatten and erase.
I mean a reverence for and deep respect for one another’s bodies and lives that transcends race, nationality, gender, sexuality, ability, neurotype, and absolutely species.
I mean a deep and wide sense of kinship.
I mean a sensing of this world that does not deny its magic nor ours.
I mean a belief that many worlds are possible.
I mean a belief in the power of stories, and our capacities to tell different ones.
I mean: “In the realms of enchantment, all life is sacred, and inspiration is the divine substance that can free us all.” (
)6 Reminders for Cultivating Enchantment in Disenchanting Times
Cultivating enchantment is not about avoiding pain or upset or achieving an unchanging, constantly inspired state. It’s about loving the world when it hurts. Living in a constant state of oblivious bliss is not enchantment, it’s profound mis-attunement with ourselves and the world. Loving the world means being willing to be heartbroken by the world again and again and again and still deciding it’s worth loving.
You are allowed to experience beauty and pleasure and wonder even when you are profoundly heart broken. Grief and enchantment with the world are not mutually exclusive. Rage and enchantment are not mutually exclusive. Our sense of possibility and magic can swell as our hearts shatter. It isn’t always the case. It isn’t always accessible. And nonetheless I’ve heard it over and over again in all the collective grief spaces I’ve been in: Grief can bring us into deeper reverence for the beauty of this world and those we love. We can have a deeper appreciation for the fleetingness and miraculous persistence of life amidst loss. Grief is a portal, an altared state, through which we can come to experience more magical understandings of this world and ourselves, as we realize our immersion in a world that is multidimensional, mysterious, animate, always changing.
Our enchantment with the world can coexist with our DIS-enchantment with violent systems and ideologies. Our grief and love for this world and one another can actually disrupt spells that keep us complicit and passive and disempowered. When we become disenchanted with business as usual, we make room for the world and other ways of being in it that have always existed. Grief can disrupt colonial mentalities and ways of perceiving and moving through the world, and brings us back into deeper attunement with ourselves as ecosystems.
Enchantment is not apolitical. Disenchantment from ourselves and the world is a tool of colonialism. Our enchantment to the world has been intentionally disrupted by systems of oppression seeking to disrupt our relationships, our erotic power, our creativity, and our relationships with ourselves as bodies of land, as networks of kin inseparable from the land. The violence of colonialism and capitalism has always sought to erase the inherent value of the world. Empire continues targeting those with deep and wide understandings of kinship, uprooting people from the lands they love, destroying their olive groves, using weapons of sexual and gender violence, and mass murdering those who resist. Our collective enchantment is a threat to this violence. Our enchantment troubles the systems that depend on our disempowerment & alienation from our dreams, desires, feelings, and one another. We trouble the systems that depend on our alienation from the webs of life that sustain us.
Our enchantment is a form of nourishment. Our enchantment is medicine. Even experiencing just a few moments of this world’s beauty can reorient us. Our enchantment resources us, nourishes our capacity to hold complexity, and to respond creatively to activation and heartbreak. When we are able to sense ourselves and the world as full of magic, even just for a moment, we can find ways through where we thought there were none.
Enchantment is a practice, and a collective one. We will have to return our attention to the places of beauty and pleasure and joy and magic and empowerment. We will have to do it again and again. This is not a solitary practice. We will have to lean on each other - human and more than. As we build our own muscles and neural pathways for enchantment, we can also know that we will take turns holding it for one another, and remember there are others out there cultivating enchantment even on days when it’s not within reach for us. If you are disenchanted today, let someone else hold it for you. Know that it can return, and that someday you will hold it for someone else.
One Enchanting Thing
One thing keeping me going and bringing me back into a state of enchantment is singing. Singing with other people. Singing by myself. Singing to my dogs. Singing to the woods. Singing the little one in my life to sleep at night while scratching her back. I don’t sing every day, but when I remember to, it does a whole hell of a lot.
I love this because the etymology of enchantment has to do with song and its power to altar consciousness and relationship.
Singing is an old technology.
I also love this episode by Josh Shrei, where he explores enchantment, enchanted lands, song, and how “the enchantment of land has been considered by many cultures their ultimate duty as human beings.” Listen here.
Sending big care and wishing you a song-filled week,
Mara June
If there’s one enchanting thing right now in your day or week, however small, what is it?
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Pausing to notice the sunrise enchants me.
warm nourishing oatmeal in my empty belly is enchanting