What does enchantment mean to you? For me, the word conjures a sense of wonder and delight; tingles and effervescence; a joyful enthrallment in a person, place or experience.
So, what of re-enchantment? Can we capture those emotions again in an enchantment do-over? Can we feel the sparkle anew?
It’s a topic the fabulous Katherine May discusses in her book Enchantment: Reawakening Wonder in an Exhausted Age, but I came across the phrase again recently, in a trend report called The Age of Re-enchantment by Wunderman Thompson Intelligence. The report is for brands wanting to learn how to connect with consumers and it’s intriguing because it attempts to mine and define the attitudes, fears and desires driving us as individuals and societies right now. And the conclusion, as the title suggests, is that we are craving re-enchantment – or, as the report puts it, ‘jaw drops, heart swells, and goosebumps’.
That all sounds too big to me – shock and awe mountaintop summits; sunsets over tropical seas; coral reef splendour; the buzzing, noisy adrenaline of sports cars and speedboats. It’s not the kind of awe I can access in my everyday life, yet I know that awe is viewed as an antidote to our age of anxiety, transporting us to a world of magic and mystery. Psychologist Dacher Keltner has written the book on this, Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder.
But I want a softer version of awe. A gentle re-enchantment. Less Grand Canyon and more sitting under a tree in my local park.
I want to look at the people I live with and the streets I walk down every day with noticing eyes, alert to the tiny scar or spray of freckles on soft skin, or the fairy doors that have appeared, propped against tree trunks in a neighbour’s garden.
I want to feel re-enchanted by my home rather than rushing through its spaces unheeding as I tend to the demands of the day.
When we first moved into this house, we fell in love with the staircase. It’s not super-special, but it has a bannister that ends with a graceful curl and a half-landing with a window, so it has a sense of spaciousness. The morning light strikes the back of the house and makes the stairway glow, and it’s the first thing I notice when I get up to make a cup of tea in the morning. That’s a re-enchantment every sunny day.
When it’s warm outside, I can open the door in my office and listen to the magpies and squirrels shouting at each other in the trees behind the house. Last week, I looked up from my keyboard and a young fox was standing in the doorway looking at me. It was a whispering awe moment; the hush holding until it moved away.
A big part of enchantment is making a point of noticing small, everyday wonders like these. But re-enchantment is also about creating change, so we see things afresh. That might mean moving items to create a sense of visual surprise, so the eye snags on a photo or ornament, rather than sliding over it. Or it might be shaking up our usual routine to redefine our experience of being at home – reading a book in a new corner, or drinking a cup of coffee in a different spot that forces us to look at a room from a new angle (it’s amazing how sitting in another seat changes our perspective).
I can’t easily move the furniture around the house (it goes where it goes) but recently I swapped the bathroom mirror for one that had been in our hall. I’ve repainted the frame of another mirror in my study. I changed the arrangement of jewellery boxes on the cupboard in the bedroom. And I thought about how I wanted to feel when I sit at my desk, and changed the books and pen pots there to inspire me.
These tiny interventions have prompted an engagement with my surroundings that had been lacking for a while. It’s not a big redesign or decoration project; in fact, I’m probably the only person to notice the changes. But they have prompted mini moments of appreciation.
Which I find enchanting.
Coming up: an interview with Penny Wincer about her new book, Home Matters: How Our Homes Shape Us, and We Shape Them.
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Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
I love your posts and sometimes don't always make it to the comments box to say so! But the idea of re-enchantment is wonderful and it really helped lift my summer holidays and take me to a space where I could appreciate and enjoy the everyday of being with my family at home and in a very small chalet in Wales! x