Reclaiming Enchantment After Exhaustion

There are times when the marrow of life feels spent. We arrive at the edge of our own strength and find only hollowness echoing back. Exhaustion presses us thin – like the tide withdrawing so far that the shoreline is left bare, the rocks exposed, the seaweed limp. It is not only the body that falters in such times, but the imagination – the deep well of soul-story that animates our seeing.

Enchantment is not something we can grasp at with weary hands. It does not yield to willpower, nor to the demand that it appear. Enchantment is the quiet arrival of the Otherworld through cracks in the ordinary – and when we are emptied by exhaustion, our vision often dims. The danger is that we mistake this dimming for absence. Yet the Irish cosmology teaches us otherwise. The Otherworld is never gone – it is only veiled.

In the language of the elements, exhaustion belongs to fire and earth. Fire, when overextended, burns through its own fuel until nothing remains but ash. Earth, when compressed without pause, hardens into barren clay. Both require water and air to soften them again. The waters of grief, the breath of renewal. Reclaiming enchantment is not a heroic act of striving – it is the willingness to let water seep back into the dry ground, to let wind move through what has become heavy and still.

Irish myth is filled with figures who journey through wastelands, where the rivers have dried or the trees no longer bear fruit. These are not stories of permanent desolation but of thresholds. The land mirrors the soul, and the restoration of fertility depends on relationship – on remembering the reciprocity between human and more-than-human. In eco-psychology we might call this the renewal of the ecological self – the widening of identity so that the self is not a sealed skin but a porous shoreline where birdcall, rainfall, stone and story have their dwelling.

When exhaustion leaves us disenchanted, we can begin in small ways. We can place our ear to the soil and listen for the heartbeat of the earth. We can sit beside water – a stream, a well, a cup of rain – and remember that flow is never lost, only hidden. We can breathe with trees, their branches widening into sky, and recall that even in stillness the air is full of movement. These gestures do not solve exhaustion – they reweave us into belonging, which is the ground from which true renewal arises.

Enchantment, in this sense, is not a spell cast upon us from the outside. It is a remembering of kinship. It is what happens when we allow the elemental world to speak again through our tiredness, when we allow myth to breathe back into psychology, when we discover that the wasteland is not a punishment but an invitation.

To reclaim enchantment after exhaustion is to soften the clenched hand. To trust that even in ash there are seeds. To lean into water, into breath, into the patient rhythms of earth. To know that the Otherworld has been here all along, waiting for us to slow enough to notice.

It is a quiet work – not dramatic, not immediate. But in the turning of seasons, in the slow return of greenness, in the lift of a raven’s wing over a field left fallow, we remember. Enchantment is not gone – it is only sleeping. And when we surrender to the lull of rest, it wakes within us again, carrying us back into the shimmering weave of a world alive.

This reflection is part of 'Sanctuary of the Waters: Where Beauty Comes to Rest' , my Autumn / Water Element 2025 newsletter. The full letter will be shared shortly – you are warmly invited to join here.

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