Sharon Blackie - The Enchanted Life: Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday

The Enchanted Life

Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday

Sharon Blackie

Also by Sharon Blackie iii

If Women Rose Rooted

The Long Delirious Burning Blue

Copyright 2018 Sharon Blackie

Published in Canada and in the USA in 2018 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

www.houseofanansi.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Blackie, Sharon author

The enchanted life : unlocking the magic of the
everyday / Sharon Blackie.

Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4870-0407-1 (softcover).ISBN 978-1-4870-0408-8 (EPUB).
ISBN 978-1-4870-0409-5 (Kindle)

1. Self-actualization (Psychology). 2. Wonder. I. Title.

BF637.S4B559 2018 158.1 C2017-905983-1
C2017-905984-X

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017961325

Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk

Illustrations: Leo Nickolls

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program

the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

Contents

Why Enchantment, and Why Now?

1. Enchantment matters

2. The unendurable everyday

What Is Enchantment?

3. To inhabit the living world

4. The wonderment

5. At home in our skin

6. The mythic imagination

The Magic of the Everyday

7. Coming home to ourselves

8. An ear to the ground

9. Kinship and otherness

10. Hands on the clay of life

11. Life as if it mattered

The Enchanted Life

12. A manifesto for an enchanted life

Acknowledgements

References

Why Enchantment, and Why Now? vi

1. Enchantment matters

The wind at dawn has secrets to whisper

Dont go back to sleep!

Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

Imagine that you are entering a small wood on a Sunday morning in late spring; youve come here to walk. You have an immediate sense of wellbeing. How peaceful, you think, as you look around you; how pretty. The trees are lovely and the birdsong is beautiful. There are ferns under the trees, and bluebells. You turn your attention to them briefly and tell yourself how attractive they are. You check your watch as you set off down the gravelled track; you have half an hour for your walk before you have to head back home. You keep to the path; it rained last night and you dont want to get your shoes muddy. Your shove your hands into your pockets; you keep your eyes straight ahead, mostly, but every now and again you look around you and tell yourself how nice it is to be away from the crowds and the traffic fumes.

After youve been walking for a few minutes, you start to think about other things. You cant help yourself; something in your head just takes over. Youve been to mindfulness classes but it never seems to stick, and most of the time mindfulness seems a bit boring, to be honest. You hum the same notes of a tune over and over. You replay an argument you had with your husband yesterday and remind yourself how unreasonable he was just how unreasonable he always is; the muscles in your stomach start to clench as you relive the irritation. You think of all the things you could have said differently, and refine your sentences until theyre the deadliest of barbs. Suddenly someone else appears on the path ahead of you, walking towards you; you jump, and realise that you havent taken in anything around you for the past several minutes. This is ridiculous, you think to yourself; Im supposed to be walking through a wood, and you try to turn off the voices in your head. You begin to feel a little anxious, because you cant. Your mobile phone buzzes, and though you briefly sigh for the impossibility of ever being truly lost in the world, youre really quite relieved to have the distraction of a text.

It starts to drizzle, and you sigh again and hunch down into your coat. You start to walk faster. So much to do when you get home, and although its nice to have this break from the vicissitudes of real life, the truth is that you just cant afford the time, really. You start to worry about how youre going to pay for the haircut your teenage daughter wants, at the expensive new salon that just opened down the road. How she seems always to be asking for something you cant afford and how inadequate that makes you feel. How youre going to pay for the summer holiday abroad (and you shudder, remembering the crowds at last years airports). Whether the interest rates are going to rise, in spite of all the governments promises, and then how will you pay your oversized mortgage

Suddenly a large black bird (is it a crow, you wonder, vaguely? Maybe a raven ) flies across your path, right in front of your face. It settles on a low branch, looks you right in the eye and squawks. For a fleeting moment something in your head cracks open a fraction and you glimpse it a sense of wonder, a sense that the bird is in some way interacting with you but then you shake your head and tell yourself not to be so silly: its just a bird, for heavens sake; youre making things up and all at once the feeling is gone. The bird flies off. You hurry on along the path, and leave the wood feeling vaguely dissatisfied, looking at your watch and your heart sinking as you realise how little of the weekend is left, and then itll be Monday and youll have to face the commuting crowds and five more days doing a job you hate before the weekend comes around again, and you have the chance to relax and take a nice walk in the woods.

Take two . Imagine that you are entering a small wood on a Sunday morning in late spring; youve come here to walk. If you brought a mobile phone with you, it is on mute: theres a time and a place for gadgets, and your attention is on what is actually here, right now in this moment, yourself in this wood. You close your eyes and listen. Rooks chattering high up in the canopy; the warning call of a smaller bird three sharp notes in succession. A few trees away, another bird replies. News of your arrival is spreading through the wood.

The air is scented with bluebells, and you breathe in deeply. You are breathing in bluebells, you think, and you smile, because that means the bluebells are a part of you now or are you a part of them? There are nettles under the trees and you have always loved nettles, ever since you heard the story of The Wild Swans as a child, about the girl who had to pick nettles with her bare hands, and spin them into shirts to save her brothers who had been transformed into swans by a wicked stepmother. You bought a ball of nettle yarn which you found by accident in a wool shop you happened upon, a few weeks ago. Youre not quite sure what youll do with it, but you like to finger it, and remember that old story which even now pulls at your heart. It tells you that theres magic in the profoundly mundane. You cant see a nettle now, or a swan, without thinking of the girl in the story, locked into silence for all of the years it took her to complete her task. Love and endurance overcoming malice and injustice, and the wild magic of plants and the one brother who had the unfinished shirt the brother with one arm and one white wing, neither wholly man nor entirely bird.