a return to enchantment

on holy longing & rituals for enchantment

Nov 28, 2023

hello dear one.

you are reading the first words of the first-ever sacred threads.

each post will contain a personal note from me (jessica fawn), a theoretical piece & a practice.

the intention is to offer slow, rich content. so settle in, get cozy & let’s dive in.

personal note • the holy longing

i’ve been feeling heavy. cynical. tense.

even though i’ve been doing so much self-awareness work, it still took me ages to remember that;

behind every hard emotion, there’s a heartbreaking tenderness.

there is a wish, a dream. a ‘holy longing’ as the poet Goethe calls it.

it’s a need so vulnerable that it might feel safer to bury it.

this is what i’d been doing; i covered an inner call with the heavy stones of cynicism.

when i gathered courage to meet the weight, it showed the longing it was hiding;

a longing for enchantment, to sense the magic of being alive. to rediscover joy.

photo by ella iris

it signalled an imbalance; i’d gone too far into the critical, intellectual side of myself. i’d lost something along the way.

and now, something is pulling me back.

it’s like a pendulum swing.

the more critical i become, the stronger the pull to magic becomes- and vice versa.

my friend once said to me;

“but jess, this is how we walk, this is how we move forward;

one step right, one step left.

walking our path is a pendulum swing.”

sacred threads is a continuation of this walk;

it’s a manifestation of the gravitational pull from critical, to magical, and back again.

may we feel it sway our hips as we walk.

may we remember we are both.

wisdom weavings • words for wonderment

when was the last time you observed the world with childlike wonder?

sensed the magic in the mundane?

wonderment, or enchantment, is a practice of relating with the world from a place of receptivity & intimacy.

the art of enchantment is a skill. much like learning a new language –or, rather, remembering a lost one– it takes practice to cultivate.

what do you get in return? embodied, rich, sensual aliveness and an unwavering sense of belonging to life.

such promise is the tantric path, as defined by by sally kempton in her book awakening shakti:

another meaning of the word tantra is “weaving,” as tantra sees the world as a tapestry of energies, all of them aspects of the energy of the divine, and therefore, all of them sacred… uncompromising in its embrace of reality… everything is worthy of being worshipped

this doesn’t mean we must detach from our ethical grounding,

but instead sharpen our primitive senses to tune back into to the soul of the world - the anima mundi.

walking between worlds

in her essay wild praise: how the celtic imagination invites us into a feral worship, mary dejong writes of a “cultural amnesia”;

separating humans from our most basic essence as creatures of the earth.

“we have forgotten who we are, and why that matters,” she writes.

in this Great Forgetting, we believe we are alone here.

we long for belonging and meaning and, weighted by our perceived scarcity, fall deeper into the chasm of disconnection.

to have this human experience is nothing short of a tragedy.

it is your birthright to live in wonder.

in carl jung's words: “as a rule, i am all for walking in two worlds at once since we are gifted with two legs.”

as is the nature of the feminine;

to plant your feet on the earth and sense the cosmos in your womb,

to feel the body and the being,

the softness and the strength,

the wisdom and the wonder.

so, how do we start to walk between worlds?

let’s explore.

remembrance ritual • practice for exploration

your practice for exploration begins with a ‘return to enchantment’ meditation.

[the ‘return to enchantment’ meditation is freely available inside the temple meditation app. click here to download on iOS & here on android.]

this meditation will help you soften and awaken your receptivity.

after this, you are invited to take a walk of wonderment.

photo by ella iris

in her ‘manifesto for an enchanted life’, mythologist and psychologist sharon blackie describes enchantment as a slow and deeply reverent relationship to life.

she invites us to notice the aliveness in everything around us, to embrace mystery and become, in the words of poet mary oliver, ‘a bride married to amazement’.

you are invited to take a walk as this bride of amazement; as though you are seeing the beauty of the world for the first time.

use all five senses;

- observing, for instance, the colour palette of the clouds;

- lend your ear to the birdsong or your neighbour’s morning chitchat;

- take in the scent as you pass the local bakery;

- snuggle your nose into a soft scarf;

- soften into the wind against your skin.

crucially, notice the experience of noticing. keep in mind this beautiful quote by julia cameron: