Re-Enchantment
— Infusing wonder into material reality.
We begin at the root.
The root of enchantment is in·cant – To sing.
To use ones’ voice and speak over our reality.
Our speech is relational with reality.
Here, we remember the following:
The connection between throat and pelvic.
The way sound shapes space –
The way humming soothes and stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system
These are some ways to activate the voice in reenchantment.
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Re-enchantment is another face of disillusionment:
To become dis-illusioned is to see clearly through the illusion.
Once illusions are dispelled, we have a clear canvas to incant. MULTI FACE
There may be grief here. Hello to it.
The illusion is soft, secure, stabilizing.
Its dissolution can be scary and confusing.
“Capitalism is a shapeshifting entity that does its best to make us feel safe and cared for.”
Elizabeth Kim for Cunning Folk
Hold tight. On the other side of the illusion’s dissolution, there is a timeless clarity. This is the place from which we incant – the heart of re-enchantment.
When our hearts are clear,
no miasms from any other source can distort our note.
When illusions fall away, we start to sing.
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In Re-Enchantment, we meet unstruck sound: The beat that pulses in perpetuity, underneath the noise. The rhythm kept by heartbeat. UNSTRUCK
Pathways to Re-enchantment:
The Sensuous: Through direct sensory engagement, we can attune ourselves to sensations of wonder, awe, and soft fascination with the world around us.
The Ancestral: By reconnecting with experiences our ancestors enjoyed, we can remember their (and our) unique blueprints to meet the unseen and imaginal realms.
The sensuous and the ancestral are woven into our heartwork. Both paths lead back to the heart. Immersion into one leads into the other; and both crystallize in the
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Re-enchantment is understood not as reclaiming some universal human relationship with nature, but as a historically situated response to specific forms of alienation produced by colonialism and capitalism. Liberatory approaches to re-enchantment recognize that different communities have different histories of enchantment and disenchantment, and that different Indigenous communities have kept lineages, practices, and perspectives alive in the face of much.
Re-enchantment as a commitment to recognizing the multiplicity of worlds and ways of knowing that colonialism attempted to eradicate. This means understanding re-enchantment as inherently political, tied to land rights, sovereignty, and the dismantling of ongoing colonial structures.
There’s a gender dimension to reenchantment. The scientific revolution's mechanical worldview (nature as dead matter to be manipulated) paralleled emerging views of women's bodies as reproductive machines to be controlled.
However, science can also be a source of enchantment – of awe, wonder, and fascination with mystery. Writers like Richard Tarnas and David Abram argue that science itself, particularly ecology and physics, can be a source of wonder rather than disenchantment.
reenchantment as a balm to the industrialized world's alienation
We begin at the root.
The root of enchantment is in·cant – To sing.
To use ones’ voice and speak over our reality.
Our speech is relational with reality.
Here, we remember the following:
The connection between throat and pelvic.
The way sound shapes space –
The way humming soothes and stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system