The Enchanted Life ~ Manifesto For An Enchanted Life ~ Sharon Blackie

Manifesto for an Enchanted Life

1. Everything around you is alive: believe it.
Tell stories to stones, sing to trees, start conversations with birds. Build relationships.
You’ll never be lonely again.

2. To be fully in your body is to be fully alive.
Get out of your head and into the world.

3. Look for the wonder wherever you go.
Be all your life, as American poet Mary Oliver suggested,
'a bride married to amazement'.

4. Embrace mystery – don’t be afraid of what you don’t know.

5. Cultivate your mythic imagination:
the inner and outer landscape of myth.

6. Know your place. Learn to belong, because wherever you go,
there you are.
There is nowhere else real to be.

7. Cleave to the local and the ethical.
Cultivate community spirit, and autonomy.

8. Slow down.

9. Create.
Buy handmade.
Live folklorically.

10. Don’t have a career: have a life.

Find your calling – but, above all,
find your meaning in the community of the world.

11. Foster meaningful ritual; make each day a ceremony,
or make a ceremony in each day.

12. Cherish otherness, in all its forms;
confront in yourself, and explore,
the forms of otherness which make you uncomfortable
or afraid.

13. Treasure change: it’s the stuff from which lives are forged.
Stop looking for the eternal and immutable,
and, enter the daily dance with the transitory."

~ Sharon Blackie, 'The Enchanted Life'