"There is no way to re-enchant our lives in a disenchanted culture except by
Becoming Renegades of that Culture
and planting the seeds for a new one."
Thomas Moore
There is a hollowness that productivity cannot fix and success cannot reach.
Philosophers call it disenchantment. The sociologist Charles Taylor calls it the buffered self: the modern condition of living behind glass, protected from anything that might actually reach you, touch you or undo you a little.
It is the cost of a world that has learned to commodify everything, including experience itself.
When everything is a transaction, nothing is sacred.
When nothing is sacred, something in us goes out.
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You can be productive, successful or even admired in this state. But your body will know you are living at a fraction of your actual capacity for being alive, and that something essential has gone missing. That the world has lost its texture,depth and ability to astonish you.
It is the water we swim in, and it takes genuine effort and attention to stay afloat in it.
Anél Hamersma
For twenty-five years I've been obsessed with a single question: what does it actually take to remain fully human in a world designed to flatten us?
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The search has taken me through performance and theatre, through an initiation ceremony in Botswana, through indigenous ways of knowing that the modern world has largely forgotten, through a chronic illness that made the question urgent and personal and through the science of attention and what happens to us when we lose it.
Most recently it has brought me to the threshold of the Catholic Church, drawn in by mystics and liberation theologians who are asking the same question I am.
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What I've found across all of it is that the capacity for aliveness is never lost: it goes underground and it can be recovered.