Encounters with Enchantment
How a recent visit to Emily Dickinson's home is nourishing me
Thank you for all the love about Take Me to the Thin Places, my fourth poetry collection that I self-published last month! These poems absolutely rattled my heart as I wrote them (in the best way), and I truly hope that you read something you love. As always, I would love to hear what is resonating with you, so keep those messages coming!
I should be cleaning my kitchen right now instead of typing away here, but if you’ve been around this Substack long enough, you know that I will almost always choose creating over cleaning (for better or for worse). The wonderful book club I am part of read Katherine May’s book Enchantment for our June meeting. The book is lovely. I’m grossly simplifying it, but essentially Katherine spends a couple hundred glorious pages walking readers through her own experience of becoming disenchanted and disoriented during the pandemic, and how embarking on the messy quest to connect with wonder and awe again brought her back to life.
I had the incredible chance to be on a small group Zoom call with Katherine back in March 2022, during what was one of the most painful emotional times of my life. When she began her Q&A portion of the call, I found myself coming off of mute to tell her that enchantment was something I deeply desired, but didn’t feel I deserved. Katherine replied by telling me in her kind but firm way that enchantment was not just necessary for thriving, but for surviving. Enchantment, she told me, is vital.
I feel deeply engaged with enchantment at the moment, and remember feeling this way as a child as well, though, admittedly, there are not insignificant spurts and stretches of time in between where enchantment recedes somewhat from the forefront of my days and gets put on the back burner for a bit - I always hope it can keep simmering and keep from burning.
This unconscious melting away or willful neglect of wonder and awe may make me feel like I’m finally “growing up” on the outside, but inside, I began to feel devoid of life. Rules and reports do not a life make. In my own experience, I must craft rituals and record the truths that emerge from every day and extraordinary encounters as a way of summoning and sinking into encounters with enchantment, but I can’t make too many hard and fast rules about what that looks like. For me, ritual might look like holding a lucky rock from Prince Edward Island in my palm when I fly, and recording might be writing in my journal what it felt like to visit one of Boston’s many centuries old cemeteries. With no pastor in charge of these rites, I get to devise my own sacraments. There are few things more satisfying than getting to lead your life in this way.
At the same time, enchantment can still evoke feelings of foolishness for me. As an actor and poet, I’ve often felt like somebody might look at me from time to time and walk away believing that I have my head in the clouds, my feet not quite on the ground, and that the involuntary passion that I possess (or that possesses me) for words and feelings and a nameless zesty energy is “extra” somehow.
In my bones, I know it’s essential. But.
How do I communicate the visceral experience of enchantment while trying to commune with the thin places?
Doesn’t trying to pin down an embodied experience into words flatten it somehow, make it wooden?
I want so desperately to paint a picture in motion, the paint not yet dry. How do I do that on Substack? How do I expect to be seen as a serious writer if I choose to ride the swirl of words like a bull, being bucked with every line, enjoying it? How do I expect you to stay, to keep reading, to connect?
I don’t know. And these days, I’m less interested in needing to know or explain or even try and predict what each and every reader might respond to. I want to feel. Do. See what happens when I attempt to write those experiences in the moment. Invite you to come along.
These days, I’m slowly but surely expanding the space around my Grief and am so grateful to be encountering so many people, places, and things that allow me to feel enchanted. I feel rich and satisfied when I experience enchantment. Yet the sustenance I get from such an encounter is both timeless and temporary. I crave more. I’m about as interested in judging my hunger for awe as I am my hunger for daily meals. Since when do we need to justify our need for nourishment?
Back to Enchantment. I can’t stop thinking about the concept of hierophany that Katherine May explores early on in the book. In a digital interview, she describes hierophany as:
“…this term coined by the sociologist Mircea Eliade. And it refers to the way that the sacred expresses itself in the real world. So that could be loads of things. It could be, for example, an ancient standing stone which we understand as an ancient object of worship, even if we don’t understand the exact meaning of it. Or it could be a landscape feature that has been given a creation story or some level of meaning.
Whatever it is, it’s this real world, physical place or object that’s imbued with a sense of the sacred. When we move through those landscapes that have got these sacred incursions in them, we start to move through a much more storied landscape, a place that’s full of meaning. It’s a really beautiful concept.
I began to wonder what my hierophany is. What are the sacred objects for me that take me into a sensation which is very embodied and very physical. I think there’s something about that sense of the sacred that’s beyond words.”
The word hierophany is new to me but the feeling of being in the presence of a holy space is not. For me, a sacred space is less likely to be a church than the physical spaces once inhabited by creative kindred spirits. This could be the gardens at Great Maytham Hall in Kent, England, where Frances Hodgson Burnett found the inspiration for what would become The Secret Garden, or it could be a stretch of Santa Monica beach where one of my favorite musicians composed a song about missing the person he loved most. No matter the physical space, there is something about literally walking in the footsteps of someone who crafted something that has become an indispensable part of me that feels like a sacrament worth celebrating.
Even writing this post, with its attempt at a rational introduction, I could hear my inner critic telling me I needed to include context and exposition lest I toss readers attention around like a tempest. When the inner critic speaks up, I can feel the original zest I feel for a post begin to cool off a bit. I took an evening walk before I sat down to write, and when my body was in motion, I could feel the sensations and phrases connected to spending a recent Sunday at Emily Dickinson’s Amherst, Massachusetts home, The Homestead and The Evergreens, keenly. I adore visiting authors homes, as they gift me with such a sharp sense of hierophany and enchantment, and leave me feeling less alone. Sweet and tart, this enchanted encounter beckons me into a daydream reverie and produces a subtle pull inside my chest that keeps me right here in this moment. I want to dive fully in, as if to a cool swimming pool. I don’t want to put one toe in at a time.
We know Emily Dickinson as a defining nineteenth century female American poet who, despite publishing only 10 poems during her lifetime (anonymously), left the world (and her sister Lavinia) nearly 1800 poems in a dresser, discovered after her death at the age of 56. English teachers may tell you Emily was sad, anti-social, even a recluse. Oh, but there is so much more to her.
What they don’t tell you is that Emily loved to play piano at 3 am and bake for her friends and family. Poems and pastries were passed back and forth between her home, The Homestead, and her brother’s home, The Evergreens. Many of the 1800 poems discovered were written in small handbound books - known as fascicles - that she crafted herself, while others were scribbled out on the backs of envelopes, chocolate wrappers, and scraps of paper she must have procured around the house that despite their original uses, couldn’t escape the fate of poetry.
When she was 16 years old, Emily attended Mount Holyoke Seminary, but left after only one year. During her time studying there, the instructors judged students not only by academic performance but by their apparent religious and moral fiber. According to the Emily Dickinson Museum’s website, “Students were organized into one of three groups: those who professed, those who hoped to and those who were without hope. Dickinson was among eighty without hope when she entered and was among twenty-nine who remained so by the end of the year.”
Emily, like so many other prophets that appear as poets, was deemed a “No-Hoper” by her teachers at Mount Holyoke. Deeply interested in spirituality, Emily didn’t like dogma. Like so many souls before and after, she was discounted and discarded by Religion. Unlike so many people crushed by that system, she didn’t let her No-Hoperness keep her from communing with “the thing with feathers - / That perches in the soul.”
I couldn’t wait to write to you all about my visit to Emily’s home. I felt like a pilgrim spending time at a holy shrine and have so much to say on the subject, and at the same time, am coming up short to make you feel how it felt to be there. This gap arises in my writing so often that some days I give up on putting words to paper here before I even begin. My vision for what I want to send forth to you in this space does not easily align with the reality of trying to type out the thoughts and feelings that I do my best to sort through. An aliveness is lost in the exchange, and I begin to doubt whether this kind of digital telegram works for delivering what feels to me are vital messages. I keep trying.
On my walk tonite, I spoke some of my feelings about visiting Emily’s home aloud, and they felt wet and neon on my lips, like paint that hasn’t yet dried. I want to give them to you that way: dynamic and wriggling, not dead and in five paragraph form. There is a time and place for reasonable writing, but it’s not in my little corner of Substack, I’m afraid. In time, I hope to trust the value of that wriggly writing. At present, it feels like a mess. I will keep trying.
Being in the Dickinson house felt like chasing someone across the centuries in slow motion. It was as if Emily had just left and swept around the corner before I stepped into room after room. We keep missing each other. We won’t catch up, at least not in this lifetime. And somehow that makes the labyrinth I seem to walk around her more sacred.
She’s certainly not the only kindred spirit I keep in another century altogether, though she is the newest old friend I’ve made, and I feel drunk on the newness of our acquaintance. I can’t stop talking about her and how she makes me feel seen and bold and justified and worthy. Standing in the garden the staff is recreating behind The Homestead, I see Sweet William blooming and promise myself that someday our garden will have Sweet William, too. I don’t know if I can bring forth flowers from the earth as she did (in both the garden and the conservatory her father built her for the cooler New England months), but I will try.
While standing in the parlor of The Evergreens, the docent listed the guests who had come to visit Austin and Susan Dickinson in that very room. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. I was almost hesitant to exhale lest I diffuse what air was left from when they stood in this very room. I felt a shiver recalling a Sunday last August spent on a tour of Emerson’s home in Concord, and of a Wednesday in July two years ago visiting Frances Hodgson Burnett’s very own secret garden in England.
We had traveled over oceans together, but a century apart. All of our paths led us to converge in this parlor on the last day of June in 2024.
Did they also admire the large landscape near the front windows, with the little fox in the foreground of the snow?
While we stood in the library of The Homestead - Emily’s favorite room and where her body was lain before burial - the docent quoted a line from Emily’s obituary, written by her dear friend and sister-in-law Susan. The words took my breath away: “She hitched her wagon to a star - and who could ride or write with such a voyager?”
I bought her complete poetry collection in the gift shop and I can hardly believe I get to speak her words aloud any time I please.
“Wild nights - Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!”
What riches are these?
Standing in her room on the last morning of June, taking in the tiny (replica) writing desk in her rose wallpapered bedroom, the room felt full.
Of Emily?
Of my own desire to understand what she felt when she was writing verses at 3 am, the stifling summer Amherst air outside fueling the fire that burned within her? To know if she felt like me when I hear a poem arrive from nowhere and write it down any way I can?
Of the desires of every single person on that tour? All of us aware that we are only here for a short time, and realizing that we can’t last forever, hopefully hell bent on discharging some lighting of our own in the time we have left?
After our tour, and before the sky opens up and we get soaked in the downpour that is to come, I make sure to stand on the edge of the garden facing east towards the mountains. Thunder groaned low, threatening from a distance. The sky would soon crack open. For now, I wanted to imagine what it was like for Emily to both be forever at home and to always be able to gaze out into such vastness. This prospect and refuge makes sense to me.
I am so afraid of what the future brings; there is so much change brewing both inside me and without. I don’t know what will happen. And yet, I feel rooted as an oak in a sense of trust that there will continue to be sacred spaces and places anywhere and everywhere that I go, and that I am committed to seeking them out and worshipping at their feet. Not in service of fashioning golden idols by which to set my watch and abdicate my own Self, but rather to act as guideposts for all us No-Hopers who have gone before. Who, dismissed by those claiming to own the religious and social keys, have gone ahead with Hope on a spiritual path of their own, lighting the way for those of us who know how to track in the dark, in spite of how the torch they carried burned their fingers at times.
If you are able to recognize enchantment, you will always (eventually) find a way to feast.
Now it’s your turn, Reader. What is a place that brings you a sense of enchantment?
What do you believe about that particular place?
Who do you meet there?
What does it help you to believe about yourself?
Looking forward to meeting you here next week. Until then, I am wishing you as many encounters with enchantment as you can find, and the boldness to feel them all.
What a beautiful reflection on your visit. Thank you for sharing! I love Dickinson and have always wanted to visit Amherst. It seems like a holy pilgrimage.