Katherine May

“I love Katherine May’s new book, Enchantment.…It’s a beautiful offering of light, truth and charm in these strange, dark times.” – New York Times bestselling author Anne Lamott “Katherine May gave so many of us language and vision for the long communal ‘wintering’ of the last years. Welcome this beautiful meditation for the time we've now entered. I cannot imagine a more gracious companion. This book is a gift.” – New York Times bestselling author Krista Tippett From the New York Times–bestselling author of Wintering, an invitation to rediscover the feelings of awe and wonder available to us all Many of us feel trapped in a grind of constant change: rolling news cycles, the chatter of social media, our families split along partisan lines. We feel fearful and tired, on edge in our bodies, not quite knowing what has us perpetually depleted. For Katherine May, this low hum of fatigue and anxiety made her wonder what she was missing. Could there be a different way to relate to the world, one that would allow her to feel more rested and at ease, even as seismic changes unfold on the planet? Might there be a way for all of us to move through life with curiosity and tenderness, sensitized to the subtle magic all around? In Enchantment, May invites the reader to come with her on a journey to reawaken our innate sense of wonder and awe. With humor, candor, and warmth, she shares stories of her own struggles with work, family, and the aftereffects of pandemic, particularly feelings of overwhelm as the world rushes to reopen. Craving a different way to live, May begins to explore the restorative properties of the natural world, moving through the elements of earth, water, fire, and air and identifying the quiet traces of magic that can be found only when we look for them. Through deliberate attention and ritual, she unearths the potency and nourishment that come from quiet reconnection with our immediate environment. Blending lyricism and storytelling, sensitivity and empathy, Enchantment invites each of us to open the door to human experience in all its sensual complexity, and to find the beauty waiting for us there.

Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

Enchantment

Amelia

I often think that ritual gives us something to do with our hands rather than our heads, performing a set of actions that root us into our being again. Ritual is different from worship: a matter of instinct rather than construction, a gesture that lets us weave significance in the moment. It is so undemanding, so simple, almost passive. You follow the steps, and they take you down to find what you need.

Nikkita

Laura Mei

At the edge of consciousness we sense a kind of absence. It is not so easy to articulate but it carries its own dark, middle of the night fear, its own harrowing. It's the sense that we have become disconnected from meaning in a way that we don't even know how to perceive. We feel it most keenly when we reach for the language of grief but find only platitudes; when we hurl the darkest wastes of our experience out into the ether and find no one willing to catch them. Something has been lost here, vanished beyond living memory; a fluency in the experiences that have patterned humanity since we began. We have surrendered the rites of passage that used to take us from birth to death and in doing so, have rendered many parts of our experience unspeakable. We witness them anyway, separately, mutely, in studied isolation from our friends and neighbors who are doing the same. Centuries of knowledge are lost in this silence, generations of fellowship. Constantly surrounded by conversation, we are nevertheless chronically lonely.

I need a better way to walk through this life — I want to be enchanted again. Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory. It relies on small doses of awe, almost homoeopathic. Those quiet traces of fascination that are found only when we look for them. It is the sense that we are joined together in one continuous thread of existence with the elements constituting this earth and that there is a potency trapped in this interconnection — a tingle on the border of our perception. It is the forgotten seam in our geology, the elusive particle that binds our unstable matter, the ability to sense magic in the everyday, to channel it through our minds and bodies, to be sustained by it.

There has been a yearning in me that I'm only just beginning to understand, a craving for transcendent experience, for depth, for meaning, for making. It's not just that the world needs to change I need to change, too. I need to soften, to let go of my tight empirical boundaries, to find a greater fluidity in my being.

Imagine moving through a place where each landmark unpacks its own mythology, grand stories unfolding around you as you go about your daily business, transcendence happening in real time. Even in the day-to-day, you could not avoid re- flecting on the big moral and ethical questions of life, because they would be present, unavoidable. Over a lifetime, you would approach these ideas in a million different ways. Our most familiar places would become maps of myth and wisdom, blooming around us like fractals, inviting us into an ever more nuanced engagement with meaning.

Sacred places are no longer given to us, and they are rarely shared between whole communities. They are now containers for our own knowing, our own meanings, They don't translate across minds. It falls on us to keep them.

When I walk, I fall through three layers of experience. The first is all about the surface of my skin, the immediate feedback of my senses. It is often twitchy and uncomfortable: my boots are too tight; there's a twig in my sock. My backpack won't sit square on my shoulders. My walking is stop-start in that phase, curtailed by an endless series of adjustments. I am never sure if I really want to go the distance. But if I walk on through that, those sensations eventually fade and they’re replaced by bubbling thought, a burgeoning of ideas and insights, a sense of joyous chatter in the mind. This is the point in a walk when the interior of my mind feels luxuriant, a place so pleasurable to inhabit that I never want my legs to stop. It's a creative space, a place where problems are solved in unfathomable ways, the answers arriving like truths known all along.

If I carry on walking, eventually that fades, too. Perhaps it is low blood sugar, or perhaps the popcorn brain burns itself out eventually, but at some point I reach a very different state of mind, a place beyond words in which I feel quiet and empty. This is my favourite phase of all, an open space in which I am nothing for a while, just an existence with moving parts and a map in my hand, whose feet know the route and do not need my interference. Nothing happens here, or so it seems. But in its aftermath, I find my most profound insights, whole shifts in the meanings and understandings that underpin who I am. In this state, I am an open door.

When I want to feed small, I go to the sea at its lowest ebb.

It's a skill peculiar to living near the coast, to have an inmate sense of the rise and fall of the tide. When you walk there every day, you absorb its patterning, the way it changes shape across the week. Sometimes you can smell it, the salty reek of exposed seaweed carried inland by the wind or captured by a sudden fog. Sometimes you can hear it from a few blocks away, the slightly different quality of sound that rebounds when the water is present. When I've been away from the sea for a few days, I lose my sense of its rhythm, and I'm disoriented. It's like I've lost my clock.

I choose my time carefully to visit the shore. It's not the bulk of water that I crave, but its absence. Here in Whit-stable, the sea retreats so far that it's barely visible, just acres of mud in its place. For many, this represents a peak of disappointment in the day, but not for me. I like to stand on the white part of the beach, where the ground beneath my feet is made mainly of crushed cockleshells, and to gaze at the sheer wall of the East Quay. Specifically, I like to track the green line made by the high tide, metres above the bare seabed. I'm calculating the volume of water it must take to meet that line, savouring the gut feel of the vast brackish influx that comes twice a day. It's impossible, surely, but it happens like elemental clockwork, so quietly, so gently that you barely notice it. Spend half a day on the beach and you will know its soft power, the way it creeps up on you. I like to step down a little farther on from the solid edge of the shore, into the place that will soon be in-undated. The intertidal zone, that most liminal of spaces.

I like to listen to the minute trickle of the water that remains. I like to imagine the sea far above my head.

Only occasionally do I remember that I am really watching the pull of the moon. The sun influences the tides, but only weakly; the moon's proximity to the earth, and its sheer scale, means that tides are gravity made visi-ble. As the earth rotates, the sea reaches towards the moon, causing a high tide at the closest point. A simultaneous high tide rises at the opposite point on the globe, too, the farthest point from the moon. This one is a little more coun-terintuitive: here, the moon does not exert enough gravity..on, but it does have a very real influence on our perception of the tides. A day as we know it is twenty-four hours long, but the moon orbits the earth in twenty-four hours and fifty minutes.

This means that from where we're standing, the tides shift by roughly an hour each day, moving restlessly through the mornings and afternoons, as if they are trying to escape us.

There are two giant waves travelling endlessly around the earth, and twice a day we see their full volume. We barely sense the scale of what is really happening, because we only ever witness it locally. We rarely stop to think that they join us to the entire planet, and to the space beyond it.

We are a forgetful species, obsessed with the endless succession of tasks that hover over our days, and negligent of the grand celestial drama unfolding around us. And here I am, remembering.

The two of us have woven enchantment, reconnecting this place to its old meanings and find. ing new ones of our own. It didn't take much. It was the simple work of willing hands, an act of listening, a commitment to seeing a place that had become invisible.

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