In 2022, Katherine May joined the Interfaith Lecture Series during a week centered on “Embracing the Dark: Fertile Soul Time.” She spoke about her book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times — and about how gentle quietness, and soothing and meditative work like baking bread, can be restorative and transformative.
“If we become permeable, we not only expand our wisdom, but we also merge a little more with the other humanities around us,” May said in 2022. “Wintering is always a communal experience. If we let it, it deepens our compassion and wisdom, and draws us a little closer to that beautiful community of all of us across all time.”
There is wonder to be found in the dark, rather than isolation. It is important, during difficult times, to feed oneself — both literally and figuratively.
Since she last spoke at Chautauqua, May has continued her work in uplifting the marvels to be found in the seemingly quotidian; her podcast, “How We Live Now” is among the top 1% worldwide, and her memoir of a midlife autism diagnosis, The Electricity of Every Living Thing, was adapted as an audio drama by Audible. She’ll return to the Interfaith Lecture Series, closing a week dedicated to “Wonder and Awe: Reverence as a Response to the World,” at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, discussing her latest book, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age.
Evolving naturally from her work in Wintering, Enchantment became an instant New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller. In it, May invites her readers on a journey to reawaken their innate sense of wonder and awe, in a world that — already overwhelming in the digital age — rushed to re-open after the pandemic.
“Enchantment came so easily to me as a child,” May wrote in her book, “but I wrongly thought it was small, parochial, a shameful thing to be put away in the rush towards adulthood.”
Seeking to find that enchantment again as an adult, May wrote, she realized that when she was young, it came from a “deep engagement” with the world around her — the acts of paying attention, of noticing.
“I worked hard to suppress all of those things. I thought it was what I had to do in order to grow up,” she wrote. “It took years of work, years of careful forgetting. I never realized what I was losing. But enchantment cannot be destroyed. It waits patiently for us to remember that we need it. And now when I start to look for it, there it is: pale, intermittent, waiting patiently for my return. The sudden catch of sunlight behind stained glass.
The glint of gold in the silt of a stream. The words that whisper through the leaves.”
And so May sets out in the book, searching for “the chance to merge into the wild drift of the world, to feel overcome, to enter into its weft so completely that sometimes I can forget myself.”
But it’s a “lofty goal,” she wrote, “when I can barely shift my mind into motion.”
With her book broken into sections dedicated to the natural elements — earth, water, fire, air — chapter by chapter May recounts moments of burnout and anxiety, and moments of magic and joy. She draws on historical resources — American newspaper articles from 1833 documenting the “bombardment of light” from the Leonid meteor storm, an account in Göttingisches Journal of the Natural Sciences of a trick played on a hiker’s eyes by shadows from a low-lying sun — and ties them to her own experiences of seeking out enchantment, from a beekeeping course to a story of the lengths she, her husband and her son went to witness the Lyrid meteor shower.
“We, who so often think we’re cultureless, can unpack a galaxy of stories from one garden week,” May wrote. “But the time has come for us to understand what these stories mean to us, and to reconnect with the other stories, too, which are all waiting for us in our gardens and surging up from the cracks in the pavement. … And storytelling is always an exchange: when we listen to what is told to us, we enrich our mythology. We get closer to the big beautiful metaphorical whole.”
