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Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

Book by Katherine May · 2 quotes · Humanity, Connection, Enchantment

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AllHumanityConnectionEnchantmentBeautyBelongingBodiesBrain PowerChangeCommunicationCultureDutyExchangeExhaustionFearGrowing UpGrowthIsolationLearning To ListenNonverbal CommunicationSelf Love

Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age Quotes

“We, who so often think we're cultureless, can unpack a galaxy of stories from one garden weed. But the time has come for us to understand what these stories mean to us, and to reconnect with the other stories, too, which are all waiting for us in our gardens and surging up from the cracks in the pavement. We must tell them to our children, so that they can't imagine living without them. Telling them is an act of belonging, a way of pushing taproots deep into the ground. In a world full of restless and displaced people, it's an act of welcome, too. When we tell the stories of the things that inhabit our land, we help newcomers to read the deep terrain around them and perhaps to feel a little more at home. And storytelling is always an exchange; when we listen to what is told to us, we enrich our mythology. We get closer to the big beautiful metaphorical whole.”

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Book:Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age
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“We take off our shoes, or we turn on our ears. We press our hands together in a gesture of prayer, or we remember the full extent of our lungs. Perhaps we even arrange ourselves cross-legged on the ground, or perhaps we dance or walk or swim instead. When we want to escape the surface, we activate our bodies, and they show us a different intelligence, pointing to a mind that resides not just in the head. Our knowing is diffused throughout all of us, distributed through muscle and bone, pulsing through organs and conveyed in the blood. We put our feet to the ground to listen with all of it. Not all that we know is verbal. Much of it--sometimes I think the vast majority--is somatic, the concern of the body. I learned this most keenly when Bert was a baby, and I used to reach towards him in the back seat on long car journeys and feel his foot press into my palm in reply. There was communication there far beyond words, and far more soothing to both of us. When I used to sit him on my lap and kiss his soft head, I was aware that information was being exchanged between us, transmitted through my lips and received through my nose. I could not even tell you what it said. Our bodies have answers to questions that we don't know how to ask.”

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Book:Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age
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