When a writer starts charging £345 for a non-residential day retreat you’ve got to start asking who enchantment is really for. I like this writer. I think they write beautifully about quiet astonishment and the importance of paying attention to the tiny gleaming details of the lives around us that illuminate the vastness of our universe and our place within it – so I don’t want to name them. And every writer has to earn a buck, even when your books are Top 10 best sellers on either side of the Atlantic…

And yet. When a writer offers a retreat at that price for what appears to amount to little more than ‘connecting with nature,’ ‘deep play’ and going for a walk between refreshments I confess I feel my hackles rise. What is this sublime epiphany of an experience going to be exactly that will help participants to gain a greater depth of connection with ‘nature’ (as if that were something somehow apart from themselves in the first place) and reset their relationship with their burned-out selves?

There is a cycle here isn’t there, that is something about the profit motive of capitalism pushing people - including your middle class creative professional, of which I am now one, it’s true – to the point of total exhaustion then providing exactly the kind of restorative retreat they need (but not for too long) to recharge sufficiently to return to the workplace or a ‘new pathway’ ‘ready for change’- but does that change involve dismantling the military industrial complex, I wonder.

I digress. I repeat, deep play.

The money and leisure it takes to appreciate and engage in natural spaces is not attainable for everyone - some folks have got their noses so close to the grindstone that they haven’t got the time or energy to look up from it when their working day is done. To the grindstone. This isn’t new, it was ever like this, but the manner in which exclusion works changes over time. I’m thinking of Jason Allen-Paisant wandering the woodlands of Leeds, where race and colonial legacy frame the movement of the black male body through nature:

But I know you know

already they don’t expect to see

us in this area

no not round here

We’re not walking with the same codes are we

~ ‘Essay on Dog Waking (I)’ from Thinking With Trees (Carcanet, 2021)

Or Katrina Naomi writing her ‘Golden Shovel after a Lillicrap Chilcott Ad’ which explores the disenfranchisement of the Cornish born from their homeland, pushed out by Air BnB and second homes. When I was growing up, we spent every Easter, half term and summer with our extended family in Cornwall and not one of them lives there now, forced to leave not only by the cost of housing but the paucity of skilled jobs. Self-actualisation immersed in the enchantment of coastal blue space is, in some places anyway, the preserve of the rich.

Disconnection. Exclusion.

Blue space. Water is water whether you are. It may move, following the inexorable tug of gravity down to sea level, but all the water we have on earth, locked up in glaciers or flowing in rivers, surging in the seas, is all the water there will ever be. It is finite and yet infinite. Abundant and determinate. We have more of it than we’ll ever need. It’s a powerful force that both gives life and takes life away. In the context of climate crisis, it is the thing many people fear – the deluge, the floods, the rising sea levels. And its absence – the drought.

Is enchantment what we really need? I have believed that nurturing our enchantment with the world is a way of protecting it, keeping it safe, looking after it, caring for the soul of the world as if it were a child, a family member. A child, a family member.

But is enchantment what we need? Isn’t what we really need to heal the shattered soul of the planet what the latest IPCC synthesis report recommends:

· reduce emissions sharply and give up fossil fuels

· invest in renewable energy and other low-carbon technologies

· increase energy efficiency

· rethink agriculture

· restore forests and degraded natural landscapes

· develop technologies that suck carbon dioxide from the air, called “direct air capture”, or explore other means of “climate repair.”[i]

Tonight, early spring, I stood beneath the Wellingtonias in the park as hundreds of crows came into roost. The light of a milky moon struggled through a cloud and the black boughs and birds were stark against the still sharp blue of the sky. The caw, croak, kra-kra of the birds was overwhelming, immersive. Overwhelming, immersive. Even the car alarm in the nearby Tesco car park seemed to be sounding in harmony with the murder. I closed my eyes for a few moments just to feel the sound in my body. The sound in my body.

Wellingtonias or giant Sequoias were symbolic of the great wilderness and known simply as ‘the big tree’ by American settlers. When fully grown, they can reach up to 90 metres in height, with trunks seven metres wide – this is a tree you can truly hug. When you put your hand to the bark it is soft, spongy and warm.

The Cornish plant collector and keen botanist William Lobb brought back sacksful of giant Sequoia seeds to England from California, earning him the nickname ‘messenger of the big tree.’ He found these ‘vegetable monsters’ in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in 1852 while chasing a bear and carried back large quantities of the egg-shaped cones, seeds, shoots and seedlings. Within two years gardening-mad Victorians snapped them up to adorn large British estates, including Stratford Park in Stroud.

The scientist Suzanne Simard teaches us that trees communicate their needs to each other – nitrogen, carbon, water, nutrients – through the mycorrhizal networks of fungi and plant roots underfoot. What Simard calls the ‘other world’ or the wood wide web. After being chased off by a mama grizzly bear and her cub on a research trip to the forest she returned the next day and discovered there’s two-way communication between trees by running her Geiger counter over their leaves.

Hub or mother trees nurture their young in the understory of a forest. In a single forest a mother tree can be connected to hundreds of other trees. Mother trees colonise their seedling kin with bigger mycorrhizal networks, they send them more carbon below ground, they reduce their own root competition to make more room for the kids. They send messages of wisdom to their seedlings when they are dying or injured – carbon, defence signals – which increases the resistance of seedlings to future stresses. Trees talk. Trees care?

When my first-born was tiny I took her to the Park in her buggy and we sat down together on the mossy grass to smoosh some corn puffs into our mouths and lie back and giggle at the gigantic trees. We were skint, living hand to mouth in a rented cottage on a farm, but knew we were lucky to have access to so much free green space where we spent most of our time. My daughter poked her tiny fingers into the sacred geometry of the moss, giggling again at its tickly softness with all the wonder of someone seeing everyday magic for the very first time. Without preamble she squeezed her hands into my forearm, pushed herself up onto her feet and decided to take her first few solo steps into the universe there and then. I felt my shoulders soften and my eyes glowed with the burning of her being called away from me into the deepening ravine of the big trees. She was one with their softness and the gladness of her infant joy at her own movement, chubby limbs in flowered leggings stuffed into red rubber boots and her wispy white-gold hair, that wouldn’t grow for a few years yet, lifting a little in the breeze.

Crows can be taught to talk, to mimic humans and other noise-makers who they speak back to in an exact copy of intonation, accent, pitch and rhythm. Could this be why the car alarm in Tesco’s carpark blended in so seamlessly to their roosting calls. Crows do not have vocal chords like ours, but rather a box called a syrinx made of ossified cartilage, muscle and vibrating membrane. Independent muscle control on either side of the syrinx means they can make two different sounds at once, creating rattles and caws, kra-kra’s and arps at the same time.

Crows can learn and remember, but it is thought by some scientists that they can’t understand the meaning of our conversation with them, the human resonance that drives our communication. And yet, crows have been shown to recognise humans and to share information about ‘bad’ or threatening humans by squawking. Some even show appreciation for humans by repeatedly bringing them gifts. BirdWatchingBuzz tells me that if I want to each a crow to talk I should choose a young one, build up a routine, feed it treats, create a bond. Repetition is really important. Repetition is important.

The sound of crows coming into roost at sunset, hearing thunder, the night sky, poking fingers into moss, the glint of lamplight on a discarded can, seeing leaves spiralling to the ground, factory buildings reflected in the water,[ii] people who speak truth to power, watching our shadows on the road as we walk. The milky moon, the seedling, the mimic, the bear. All of these things are daily experiences of awe.

Reverential respect, fear, wonder, inspiration – these are what add up to awe and they are often bound up with feelings about our place in the cosmos. Psychologist Dacher Keltner has shown that although there are cultural variations, awe is a universal human emotion, often beyond expression in language. Awe is almost always nearby, you don’t even have to look for it. It will present itself to you if you are open to the simple act of observation and witness to the world around you. It may not always be a force for good – awe can be used to intimidate and control (think ‘shock and awe,’ military parades on Red Square), as well as beguile. But the writer with the expensive day retreats bound up in the commodification of enchantment has surely got it wrong – you don’t need a cashmere blanket and a burned-out soul to access restorative astonishment. You don’t need a gatekeeper to let you in to awe. You don’t need to pay £345 for a view of a nature reserve. Wonder is not a privilege – it is an everyday fact of existence. Wonder is a kind of resistance. Like water, we have more of it than we’ll ever need.

Resist the presupposed nature of enchantment.

Look elsewhere. Don’t look.

And whatever you do, don’t listen to the poets.