Cultivating Enchantment

My friends Nate and Rachel and their three young children live enchanted lives.

I visited their home recently in Los Angeles in a sweet, tree-lined but not-fancy neighborhood of the city.  From the front of their property, one could not imagine what was behind the fence.  The gate opened, and spread before me was a farm.  In all its funky farmi-ness. 

Plots of vegetables mulched and covered with straw.  Flies floating and looping above the compost heaps.  Scruffy fruit trees in bloom.  Bees buzzing around the hives mounted on the flat roof of the house.  A fire pit full of logs rendered to charcoal. 

And children climbing and crawling and hollering and squealing up and in and around a cluster of trees and tangled broken branches in the upper corner of the property.  I stood near them and watched and listened.  One of them whispered to me that something was lurking in the pile of branches below one of the trees.  “Are you going to investigate?” I asked in a hush.  He nodded silently and with a look of fearless determination, he crept into the mud and the brush on his quest… enchanted.

After dinner in the house, the oldest child curled up in a chair and invited me to join her in reading a graphic fantasy novel.  We had fun looking at the pictures and commenting on the colorful characters together.  As I sat there with her, I realized that she wasn’t just entering the realm of fantasy through her book.  Fantasy was all around her, all the time, at home.  Adventures, mysteries, enchantments at every turn.

These children have parents who do not curate their lives.  They have created a way of life that allows for the feral.  The wild.  The unpredictable.  They let nature be natural, in all its messiness, and they offer that mess to their kids to experience on their own terms, according to their own natures. 

And yet they keep a clean house together.  They take baths.  They do the laundry – a lot!  They do their chores.  They go to bed on time.  They get to school on time in the morning.

My grandson Jacob, at two years old, draws me into his enchantment.  One day we were taking a walk behind our house (picture above), and suddenly he stopped and wanted to explore off the trail.  We walked together toward some bushes.  He stopped, slack-jawed, and stared straight ahead into the woods.  “Lions!” he whispered after a while, raising his arm and pointing.  “Lions!” I whispered back.  I could only begin to imagine what he was experiencing.  But to the degree that I could, it was enchanting indeed.

Because this world is alive with wonders, latent with surprises, potent with quests to be undertaken and discoveries to be made.  We were not put on this planet to experience nothing more alluring than an Egg McMuffin.

Stay attuned for those magic moments when your children become enchanted.  Allow yourself to be enchanted by their enchantment.  Let them know you are participating in it, as much as you can.  With them, get into a feedback loop that enhances these experiences, cherishes these moments, and primes them – and you - for more.

For these are truly holy moments in their lives, and in yours.