The state of enchantment is one of certainty, Auden
And we keep pretending certainty belongs to charts and forecasts rather than to the body’s quiet remembering.
We treat wonder like a commodity and then complain that life has gone sterile.
What if nothing here is ordinary? What if the steam from a kettle, the half-heard name in a corridor, the way light leans on a windowpane are not incidental but summons, asking to be seen, not analysed, and where in the body do we feel the quiet yes that answers them?
The hook is simple: we have outsourced astonishment to proof and lost the muscle that listens.
I tell a small story because story is the only currency that wakes us: once, in a hospital corridor between shifts, the world did not feel like a series of tasks but like a presence folding itself around me, and in that folding I felt something change. Not an idea but a soft rearrangement in my ribs and I understood how much I had been carrying while pretending to observe.
Enchantment is fidelity, a refusal to privatise the unseen.
How might we let ourselves be changed by what we encounter instead of bending it into usefulness?
What is the world whispering that we have forgotten to hear?
How does beauty want to move through us today?
And what if attention itself were an act of love that refuses efficiency?
These are some of the inquiries I am exploring to evoke the enchantment within me.
And then I realise something counterintuitive: what if the unseen is not empty but full?
Life always conspires to astonish us. Maybe the compass is trusting the unknown as a form of guidance and feel it travel through bone before we have language for it.
Action comes as response then, not control when we start believing again that the world can and does speak back. I invite us all to re-enter the conversation between soul and world, fully present, not certain.
This is the clarity Auden points to.
Not dominance but communion.
Not proof but belonging, the longing for remembering humanity.
Be moved.
Be present.
Be fierce.
Be tender.
Let astonishment be our compass and let that compass break open the way we live.
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