Rediscovering the Spell of the Sensuous

what writing my novel is teaching me about the next stage of my life

this is not me as a child enjoying a wild river trip but my daughter Lillian, I couldn’t find the picture of me on a beach being a wild nature girl

There is often an ache in me when I think about home.

By home, I don’t mean my current house, which I love or the home I create with Bob, which is my heart home.

Nor am I thinking of my childhood landscape—Florida was never my place, although growing up in a small town there in the 1960s and 1970s could be magical. I remember the wild empty beaches, the time I saw a Florida panther leap away from our car, and land crabs on their migratory route.

No, my ache is about wanting to belong to a physical place and never feeling like I have.

I used to think that my feeling of dislocation was because I’ve moved around a fair bit and my parents distanced themselves from their home roots due to family conflicts but I don’t believe that anymore.

As I’ve spent the last three months writing a “reverse outline” — 29,666 words about what needs to happen in the second draft — a deeper theme of my story became beautifully stark. Something about spending time with only the bones of the story made it pop.

It’s a theme that crept in quietly, as the good ones often do, and I realized this week, it’s telling me how to address my ache for home and how to approach the next stage of my life, because they are related. Of course they are!

The sneaky theme is…

Magic is connection.

Connection to other humans, yes, but also connection to the non-human world — earth and place (magic in my world is place-based, how’s that for a clue from my unconscious!!), animals and magical creatures, weather and wind.

Look at the books I’ve been using for research:

Here’s a paragraph from The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram I’ve referred to many times while writing:

“…how did civilized humankind lose all sense of reciprocity and relationship with the animate natural world, that rapport that so influences (and limits) the activities of most indigenous, tribal peoples? How did civilization break out of, and leave behind, the animistic or participatory mode of experience known to all native, place-based cultures?”

And this one:

“Magic, then, in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives— from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself — is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our own.”

My unconscious has been telling me to find the magic in connecting to place and my wild girl nature. It’s right there!

You see the magic cooperates better when the witches are in touch with their wild girl selves, the selves they were before society told them magic was dangerous, for experts only.

My wild girl self is who I want to spend more time being as I age. It’s the part of me that knows how to belong to place by being in relationship, by listening closely, by slowing down and being elementally me.

I’ve thought the ache was about a physical place, and now I wonder if it’s more about a way of being.

I believe as we age, we’re called to become who we were before we became who we are.

Not that who we are is in any way wrong. Not at all! We became who we are to survive, and hopefully, to thrive. I’m a stronger, wiser person because of how I learned to navigate the world, earn a good living as a creative, raise a confident daughter, open myself again to Bob after my divorce, learn to accept my mom before it was too late. All of it is precious, vital, not to be skipped.

And now, I am called to rediscover or develop different skills and different ways of being. Of course, for you, it may have nothing to do with connecting with wildness and place, or telling stories and building worlds. It may look completely different. But if something is tugging at you, saying “It’s not too late,” open your arms and call it inside.

What is the ache you’ve been ignoring?

Whatever it is, may you pay attention to the clues.

Love,

Jen