Enchantment Saves
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Sometimes, you get out of bed and you think, “I’m not gonna make it“… Laughing inside, you’re thinking …. “How many times I’ve said this?”
— Charles Bukowski
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I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them. After my father died, the book that sort of saved my life was Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
— Emma Thompson
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My Nanny in South Africa was a healer. When her help was needed, she was called by smoke from fires.. She did not need to be present, she told me. She traveled to where she was needed by using the smoke that called her, she became the smoke. I vividly recall the way her body smelt. Red Cedar and earth.
She had no name. I called her Be. She was my everything. My safe place. My mother.
— Heloise Idstein
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Earth is just a stopover. A kind of game. Make it a star game. If I could give you a gift, it would be to teach you how to stay free inside that game, to find the glory inside yourself, beyond the roles and the drama, so you can dance the dance of the game of life with a little more rhythm, a little more abandon, a little more shaking those hips.
— Annie Kagen
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Instead of raising children who turn out okay despite their childhood, let’s raise children who turn out extraordinary because of their childhood.
— L.R. Knost
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I really do think that beauty and enchantment can heal both body and soul if we bathe in them long enough. Children live in that world naturally but forget it as they pass through adolescence to adulthood — unless they are artists of some kind, of course. I recently read a comment by some guru about the inconsequence of children’s games that I very much disagree with. What children have naturally is enchantment, which is a gift to be treasured. Losing it to live a life of profit and loss is a tragedy, I think.
Those of us who dedicate our lives to seeing beauty in the world and adding to it know that it’s an essential spiritual force. It’s obvious that it’s very far from the…
