Magic Eels on the Buffalo River

In Celebration of Wonder and Enchantment

Richard Beck, a professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University, wrote a really compelling book called Hunting Magic Eels—Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age.  In it he writes the following:

[A]ll around us, the forces of disenchantment tempt us to strip the world of its sacred, mystical character.  Disenchantment reduces the world to matter and chemistry, mere “stuff.”  Everything is just atoms, configured and reconfigured in different ways.  There’s nothing “magical” about the elements of the periodic table.  The world is simply a collection of Lego blocks set in different arrangements.  And while this description of physical reality might be fine for a science class, something in us resists reducing a redwood forest to organic chemistry.  The enchantments of the natural world defy a wholly material and scientific description.  Redwood forests are life changing, inspiring, and holy.

Such good stuff.  He goes on to write about humans:

Basically, human beings are like redwood trees.  We cannot be reduced to raw material.  Human beings are holy.  The great hypocrisy of our skeptical age is that its greatest moral accomplishment—a moral vision founded upon universal human rights—depends on enchantment, a belief in the sacred character of human beings and life…Our dignity is an enchantment, the ghost of God still haunting the machine, and it’s the bit of supernaturalism that keeps the secular world from tipping into the moral abyss.

I can’t claim that I walk around every day with my eyes open to the wonder of the world around me, to the wonder of the people in my path.  But on my good days, on my best days, God opens my eyes to see, and I amazed.  There is more than just matter here, friends.  Let’s look for it!

A few years ago on a paddling trip with my dad and brother I wrote about moments of receptivity. I think by “receptivity” I meant an openness to the specialness (or enchantment as Beck would call it) of the world around us.  I didn’t really know what to do with what I wrote for a long time.  The good folks at Wild Roof Journal were kind enough to share it in their fall 2024 issue. Check out the journal…it’s really cool. Here’s the piece…maybe you can relate to it, or maybe you’ll think I’m nuts.

Reflections on the Buffalo River

There are these moments of receptivity, when you are tuned in to everything around—the frequency of cicadas, the croaking of bullfrogs, or the cascading dirge of a sad canyon wren, the skittering surface movements of the water spiders…when you feel like you are getting it, or feeling it again.  It can happen to you on a run in the rain along Bull Creek.  Or when you hold her hand for the first time.  Or on day two of a paddle trip down the Buffalo River, and you come across the old concrete bridge piers of the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad still jutting out of the water, the railway long ago washed away by high waters.

You can see it all and you know you must capture it all before it slips away again…the tiny sparkle of a creekbed stone, the flash of a fin underwater, the gray canvas of a rockwall or the blue of a mountain or the whole grand spectacle of the entire range, the plains leading up to the foothills and the ridge beyond.  And in your mind you can trace the tributaries climbing backward, up from the river, smaller and smaller at each branch point, back to their high mountain source, back through the history of the place, the collapsing barn, the chimney standing in the field, the rusted metals of the railway men, the settlers, the miners, and the castoff crockery and flint knappings of the natives, and the nearly forgotten battles and the massacre, and the waterways and the seasons and the snowmelt and the upthrust of the tectonic plates and the fossil beds now memorialized in stone and the lava flow. 

And if you squint just right you can almost track the past adventures of the day hikers and the backpackers and the cave-dwelling hermits and the previous generations of now obsolete camping gear in the late afternoon mountain storm.  And you recall the molecular formula of the water on which you float and its contents and its surface tension and the field mice that burrowed beneath the snows that birthed its flow and the water’s eventual inclusion in the great oceans of the world.  You sense the lifecycle of the locusts, the moss on the north side of a tree, the aphids and the lichen on the decomposing hickory.  And in those moments, you are tuned in to it all. 

You surrender to it, as if floating on your back in water in utter darkness except for the stars above you and their rippling reflections on the water and the water is chilly at first and steals your breath but you get used to it because we are born in water, we are grown in water.  Breathing slowly, you re-enter and are connected by this current, this stream, which floats you and buoys you and sometimes floods you and you sometimes have to rescue your drowning memories and mop up the floodwater and tear out the drywall that would dare contain you. 

There are these moments of receptivity when every road sign is magic because it’s particular.  And every person you meet is magic, because you realize that he is made in God’s image.  This particular human.  Not humankind.  This one human.  Because God did not create some vague universal life force, God created individual living things, and breathes real life into them.  And this one before you…this man, this frog, this tree, this rock…is magic. 

And you know.

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Thank you for reading and for staying in touch. Tell me, Crash Cart Campfire friends:

• How do you maintain a sense of wonder about this world around us?

• How do you keep a sense of wonder about the people around you?