My grandmother lived in a house she called The Enchanted Cottage. As a child, I considered it an enormous fairytale castle with secret passage ways (closets) and rooms that each had a name: the French Room, the Pretty Room, the Inn. She segmented her house into stories, in which you might encounter magic within the four walls of each one. Even her wildlife, the squirrels, had names. She fed my hungry imagination the right amount of fantasy that remains with me to this day. Thanks to her influence, I was allowed to preserve a child-like wonder from which I create every day.

Enchantment isn’t something we adults think about much. Intellectually, we know forests don’t have fairies (although of this I am not certain. Maybe one day I’ll tell you about an encounter I had with large trees and a giggling friend. And no, there were no mushrooms involved!). But every time I enter the woods, I half-expect a gnome or pixie to greet me. It’s the energy of the place that lulls me to that special place inside. The trees speak. I listen. And what I often hear is a calling beyond words.

Enchantment may be harder to find in urban settings. My grandmother was from New York City so her rural Connecticut home felt like a refuge from too many years in an urban environment. But even in a place as vast as New York, you can find enchantment if you’re with the right people.

Ultimately, enchantment resides within us. If you can cast a spell in any area of your life, whether it be work, a relationship or, like my grandmother did, a home itself, you will have created something sacred.

And who knows what influence that could have on the world?