It Begins With a Call: Enchantment (Part 17)

I have been in the underworld for quite a while.  Years, really.  The world itself feels underworldly and full of mortal demons.  

There have been two books that I’ve been profoundly affected by this last year or so – Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted and Toko-pa Turner’s Belonging.  Now Blackie has come out with another, The Enchanted Life, and it is the exact medicine I need at this moment.  It is what I’ve been lacking – enchantment.  Magic.  Spirit.  What Blackie is saying is no different from what the teacher has been saying: we are not separate from creation.  Her way of talking about it is very different, as she is a storyteller and mythologist.  But it is taking me to the same place.  It is an indigenous way of relating to life.

One of the things Blackie recommends is remembering experiences you’ve had of feeling unity with everything.  Suddenly, an image rises up of an experience I had years ago while visiting my in-laws in Marco Island, Florida.  Now, this is as unlikely a place as I could ever imagine for such a thing to occur - a man-made suburban development in an area that had probably formerly been semi-swamplands.   Nonetheless, it is on the gulf coast, and my in-laws’ condo was a short walk away from the beach.  One evening, my husband and I went for a walk and ended up by the water.  The full moon was rising over the gulf, the warm waves gently lapped the shore, and no one else was in sight.  I walked into the water, following the moon’s trail, and stopped thigh-deep.  The sounds of the water swishing over sand, the smell of the sea, the bright moon over dark sea and sky… I threw my arms up and felt at one with it all.  Joyful.  I don’t remember how long it lasted; probably only a few minutes.  But here is the memory, rising up now, reminding me that such a state is possible.  No matter what we do to her, the earth is always still here for us, and we are a part of her.  

I have been living in a time of obsessing over my health.

Whether or not any of my current issues resolves or gets cured, I want to connect with enchantment again, and not feel like my physical state is my whole reality.  And I know I need to stop thinking that one has to live in a more rural environment to do it.  I just sat outside, and I could feel my connection to the trees, the sky, the birds.  This is my work.  Or at least some of it.

My SoulCollage® card -  Enchantment