enchantment
Greetings. Thank you for sharing your time to pause, consider, and delight in matters of noticing. Some of you have been with me on this journey for years, and others of you are new friends who joined Noticing Matters in 2022. I appreciate you. I am grateful for your attention and for your attunement to what’s slow and small and of light and delight. I hope you enjoy this month’s reflection and poem of enchantment.
When I wrote be/light/full in January 2022, it was a surprising gift. Now eleven months later, I see how this word (and its poem) called forth a presence of being, an attunement to the soul—a listening to its rhythms, a finding of its circles, and a living into them.
As I look back on my writing (teaching, sharing) that emerged this year, I’ve found three themes and a beautiful surprise.
Theme one: Tend the landscape of words
Inside our words, we find the architectures of our thoughts, beliefs, problems-solutions, priorities, organizational structures, and daily ways of being. This year nudged us to excavate the words we use and to revise and reimagine them: “For us to move formless into and through what we previously held as known.” For us to consider deeply our own questions to live into. For us to (un)learn alongside children and find ways to let them express the richness of what they know.
Theme two: Be with all of it
It is possible to notice into something, to see it and be with it fully without becoming it, to find the wholeness of ourselves in our allowing of the wholeness of what is present. Even in fear there is freedom. And this can be easeful and simple. We can choose to allow-describe-reflect. We can choose to wonder and play. Our wholeness is the material for our learning and living.
Theme three: Connect with frequencies you want to create
This is not the stuff of ideas or wish. This is our practice of claiming now what is always already now. Where we connect, play, love, and delight is what we create. We choose to be in an active state of curiosity instead of judgment. We choose to accept the invitation of slowness when we feel its nudge. We choose to go inside what’s small for expansive possibilities of unknowing. We are the trying dream, essay reverie—"the aliveness of everything and the awe of it all.”
And a beautiful surprise… to find the chants of enchantment
A few months ago, I received a message about the word enchantment as a place for me to play. The word started showing up for me, in my dreams, my stories, what I heard from other beings. In my playful study of the word, I found the word /chant/ as something new. I could see how I had seen the whole of the word, enchantment, without seeing the smaller pieces inside. And the smaller pieces knew they had been overlooked and they had some things to teach me. Oh, the delight of finding something new inside something known, to be nudged into an expansive realm of possibility that has always been here, and to be gifted to see it (and share it) at the perfect time. So it is. (find poem below)
love+light, Melissa
Enchantment
A chant is for repeating.
To enchant
is to be the repeating, be
the seed,
spiral of prayer.
Feet on stars,
soil to breath
breath to blood
blood to heart
beat
beating,
be the spelling
of the repeating.
We are the chant.
We are
imprints of ancestral hands,
pathways of whales,
rooted forever moons.
We are
circles of ants held by moss,
octopus memory dispersed
as molten air.
We are
what spiders know—
the spelling
of all the chants
of all the beings
of all the time.
Enchantment is to know this.
To hear
tonal shifts of light, pulse
of echo, metronome
of bees.
To see
stone as sand, Fibonacci flowers,
the quilting of beetles,
ibis to worm to web to dream.
To live into
the rhythmic loops of our soul,
sync with earth, sing
as everything.
Nothing of dust or wish.
Not for later.
Never fading.
Always already now.
Exactly where you are.
You are the chant.
You are the enchant.
You are the enchantment.
Let’s play.
I’ll be writing throughout December on enchantment… small morsels of story, poem, song, dream… anchored in small things (think: enchantment of bees, of breath, cycles of moon). If you’re keen to connect more deeply with the frequency of enchantment, you’re invited to join as a weekly subscriber.
And, if you think Noticing Matters might be a good gift for a friend or colleague…
If you like playlists, here is a new one I made this week. Guess what it’s called?
Yup. Enjoy!
To learn more about me and my work: www.melissaabutler.com