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“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” — Rumi
When everything is a battle, when so much needs defending, protecting, preserving and reaffirming, when it feels like our souls are slowly being shredded, that is precisely when, against the dark forces enveloping us, we must seek to re-enchant our world.
To do this, we must first understand the historical context in which we find ourselves and be willing to look upon our world with clear eyes; and then, as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, let everything happen to us, beauty and terror, because no feeling is final.
Under the guise of progress, philosopher Josep Maria Esquirol explains, the last two centuries have brought us the most extreme barbarism in the form of totalitarian violence while treating the earth as a storehouse and slowly reducing it to a waste dump. Technological developments have turned us into narcotised consumers as they drive us closer and closer to the cliff edge.
While theories of all kinds are proliferating, Esquirol says, our understanding of ourselves has never been so limited.
Many of us float between paralysis and perpetual outrage. We look for certainty and solutions. We cling to out-of-date tactics, apply cosmetic changes and superficial creativity. Like the snipers taking aim from on high, we may at times hit our target, but we have lost our compass.
The key lies in not ignoring our fears, our despair; on the contrary, we must open up to them. That is subversive, Joanna Macy said, because the system that oppresses us doesn’t want us to feel, they want us silent, isolated and obedient.
When we can go beyond what we know, beyond the usual debates, reports and theories, there we may find the key to re-enchanting our world, a place where we can inhabit the world differently, more profoundly, poetically.
Poet Kenneth White called for a geopoetic movement, which is not poetic geography or a poetry vaguely geographical, it has another foundation, it opens perspectives not yet put into words or language on the relationship between earth and beings.
Having spent years travelling around the world and learning about 30 cultures that have existed since humans populated the earth, he found that all of them have one thing in common, whether they belong to religious groups, are farmers, philosophers, whether from the east or the west, it’s the earth, the land.
To inhabit the earth poetically, means, first and foremost, to get out of habits (behaviours and language) too human that are still lingering everywhere.
To live poetically is not just to revel in consolatory poetry every once in a while, but to feel oneself exist in a space-time where the great poetic currents of the planet circulate.
White explains how great spiritual advancements occurred when different forces came together, such as poetry, philosophy and science. Once these occur, they usually become collective.
This is what we need right now. This will help us see that there will always be a possible on the horizon. One must simply sometimes go look for it.
Inhabiting the world poetically is ultimately a form of resistance. Resistance to the great forces of evil being unleashed: destruction, domination, subjugation, extraction, anti-humanism. It is also nourishment for the resistance, it helps us to keep going and it can help us find our way.
Esquirol says that in times of great disorientation, it is urgent to focus on what is most essential and to do good. “To find the right path and follow it,” he says, “changes as radical as they are improbable would be necessary. But we must never give up; on the contrary, we must resist from our own corner. Perhaps only a modest contribution is possible, but everything counts.”
Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes
‘A Great Wagon,’ Rumi.
Humà, més humà. Una Antropología de la ferida infinita. Josep Maria Esquirol, Quaderns Crema, 2021.
‘Joanna Macy on the World as Lover and Self [Homage].’ For the Wild Podcast, Episode 371. January 2015. Listen here.
Le Mouvement Géopoétique. Kenneth White. Poesis, Habiter poétiquement le monde.
Poetry is/and Knowledge, Aimé Césaire.
The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer.
‘Poetry is not a luxury,’ Audre Lorde, in her essay collection Sister Outsider.
The Intimate Resistance, Josep Maria Esquirol Calaf.
Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time, Margaret Wheatley.
‘Alive and Whole in a World of Hurt: the below and beyond of well-being,’ John Paul Lederach, 13 August 2025. Read here.
“The seemingly simple act of listening to the environment often leads to unexpected complexities of thoughts, sensations and emotions that are not quantifiable or measurable. When we listen… we simultaneously take in the current conditions of the acoustic environment and those of our innermost sound world, our thoughts and emotions. [This] is both highly personal and at the same time universal. It is here where the real journey of listening starts.” — Hildegard Westercamp
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." ― Friedrich Nietzsche
“When you see people call themselves revolutionary, always talking about destroying, destroying, destroying but never talking about building or creating, they're not revolutionary. They do not understand the first thing about revolution. It's creating.” — Kwame Ture
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.” — Arundhati Roy
“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change, first made into language, then into an idea, then into more tangible action.”— Audre Lorde
“The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.” ― Carl Sagan
