Enchantment

Enchantment Plot Summary

Introduction

I was six years old when I first witnessed true wonder. Standing at the edge of a forest clearing, I watched as morning sunlight filtered through the trees, illuminating countless dewdrops on a spiderweb. Each droplet became a prism, casting tiny rainbows across the forest floor. Time seemed to stop as I stood transfixed, breathing slowly, completely present in that moment of pure enchantment. I didn't have words for what I felt then - that sense of being simultaneously small yet connected to something vast and meaningful. Many of us have lost this capacity for wonder in our adult lives. We move through our days with eyes downcast, attention fragmented by notifications, minds consumed by anxiety about the future or regrets about the past. Katherine May invites us to reconnect with the enchantment that surrounds us - not through grand adventures or dramatic transformations, but through small, deliberate acts of attention. By reawakening our sense of wonder in an increasingly anxious age, we can find meaning, connection, and a profound sense of aliveness that transcends our everyday worries. This journey toward re-enchantment offers a path to healing our relationship with ourselves, each other, and the natural world that sustains us.

Chapter 1: The Emptiness of Modern Life: How I Lost My Attention

Lately, I wake in the night and a few panicked seconds pass in which I can't locate myself. I could tell you my name, certainly, but not which version of me I'm dealing with. Once, I was sure I was back in my teenage bed. I could almost hear the creak of its metal frame as I ticked over my timetable in my head: science, history, art. Unstable reality that it was, the illusion dissipated, and for a few floundering moments I was no one at all, just someone who remembered being that girl. Then I was me again, the me that exists now, in my blue upholstered bed with sea air surging through the window. I can't read a whole page of a book anymore. It is frictionless, this sliding of attention. I thought it would resolve once the lockdowns ended, but it did not. It's as if some kind of lubrication has been applied to my choices. I intend to do one thing, but my unconscious shunts me discreetly away. It has other plans for me. I am supposed to be watching. I am supposed to be looking over my shoulder, alert to the next threat. My hands itch to be occupied. I take down the hems of Bert's school trousers and pin them back in place. There is no sense in buying a new pair. They will barely last the month. He is growing so fast. I can no longer haul him onto my lap and enfold him in my arms. We make, between us, a rough approximation of it, but there are always limbs astray, and one of us ends up writhing in discomfort. We both crave it, the heft of his body against mine, but we are overbalanced now. The last decade has filled so many of us with a growing sense of unreality. We seem trapped in a grind of constant change without ever getting the chance to integrate it. Those rolling news cycles, the chatter on social media, the way that our families have split along partisan lines: it feels as though we've undergone a halving, then a quartering, and now we are some kind of social rubble. If there were a spirit of this age, it would look a lot like fear. For years now we've been running like rabbits, flashing our own white tails behind us in a chain reaction of terror. We are in the business of running now. It is all so urgent. Every year, it seems we must run harder. We are tired. We are the deep bone-tired of people who no longer feel at home. We can see no way out of it. Meanwhile, at the edge of consciousness, we sense a kind of absence - a disconnection from meaning that we don't even know how to perceive. We feel it when the pull of our smartphones feels like an addiction, 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. I have lost some fundamental part of my knowing, some elemental human feeling. Without it, the world feels like tap water left overnight, flat and chemical, devoid of life. I am like lightning seeking earth, carrying the prickle of potential energy in my limbs. I lack the language to even describe this vast unsettled sense that I am slipping over the glassy surface of things. I want to be enchanted again - to sense magic in the everyday, to channel it through my mind and body, to be sustained by it. This is not a lofty goal when I can barely shift my mind into motion.

Chapter 2: Earth: Finding Sacred Ground in Forgotten Places

When I want to describe how I feel right now, the word I reach for the most is discombobulated. It captures perfectly my state of mind: confused, disoriented, out of sorts. For me, it carries a hint of gentle dislocation or dismemberment, a sense that its subject is being taken to pieces, their component parts flying off in different directions. Nothing is in its rightful place. I feel strangely empty, devoid of thought and energy. I am not sure where my days go, but they go. Time itself is behaving strangely. It seems to have fallen on this house like snow, clustering in certain dark corners, sparse elsewhere. It lays heavy on my rooftop, tangible in a way I can't quite explain. Certain moments in my daily life have clustered together so that they are almost touching. Every night, when I wash my face, I feel as though I have been standing at my sink in one continuous moment across several months. Time has looped and gathered, and I sometimes worry that I could skip through decades like this, standing in my bathroom, until I am suddenly old. I set out from my front door and climb the hill that leads out of town, past the old windmill and between the houses, in search of Whitstable's standing stones. Erected in November 2020, the eight large boulders stand high above the town on our equally new village green. They guard an open space amid the new houses and apartments that have begun to creep into the surrounding fields as the town center gentrifies. I would be lying if I pretended not to find the idea of a new stone circle ersatz. What are they supposed to signify? I believed at first that they were concrete. They seemed to me to offer an incomplete answer to a question that we have not quite yet learned how to ask. Arriving high above town at the new village green, I'm surprised to find that it has become a meadow. It was just bleak, short grass in the winter, but now it's high with thistles and dandelions and a multitude of swishing grasses caught by the hilltop breeze. There are butterflies, the drone of crickets and bees, flitting goldfinches. The air around me is alive. The last thing I notice amid all this movement are the stones. All eight of them standing upright in a circle, and a flat one in the middle that reminds me of a sacrificial altar. Somebody has been worshipping here. There are symbols on the stones, already wearing away: a yin-yang on one, a sun on another. New meanings—or new versions of old meanings—are being made. Just after lunchtime when I was a child, my grandmother would sit down to eat an orange, and peace would fall over the house. In a life without ritual, this was the closest we had: she would settle into her green chesterfield armchair, its seat cushion long ago re-covered with fraying brocade, and lay a square of kitchen paper across her lap. Then she would start to massage the orange, working it between her bunched knuckles until the skin was lifted from the fruit, before piercing it with a thumbnail and pulling it methodically away. It was the nearest I ever saw her get to prayer, sitting reverent in the afternoon light while she eased off the yellow silks of pith and ate, spitting out the occasional pip. Mircea Eliade coined the term hierophany to describe the way that the divine reveals itself to us, transforming the objects through which it works. When we make a tree or a stone or a wafer of bread the subject of our worshipful attention, we transform it into a hierophany, an object of the sacred. Hierophany is the experience of perceiving all the layers of existence, not just seeing its surface appearance. The person who believes lives in an enhanced world, having been given a kind of supernatural key to see wonder in the everyday. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany. In our modern, fragmented world, we hunger for this connection to the sacred in the ordinary. The standing stones of Whitstable may be new, but the human impulse to create meaning through ritual and sacred spaces is ancient. When we take the time to notice the transformative power of attention – whether through a grandmother's afternoon orange or a circle of stones on a hilltop – we begin to reclaim our relationship with enchantment. These moments of connection remind us that the mundane world is layered with significance, if only we have the patience and openness to perceive it.

Chapter 3: Water: Unlearning and Rediscovering Our Relationship with Flow

Late afternoon on a Saturday, and the sea is a quilt of wave crests. I am quite alone. I unfold my towel and it blows out sideways like a flag. I have to weight it down with stones so that it won't be carried off altogether. I like this. It's proof of my boldness, my daring. I crunch across the pebbles in bare feet and laugh when I am nearly knocked over in the shallows. In rough seas, the trick is to stay close to shore, where the action of the currents are at least predictable. I learned this last summer, when I swam too far out on a snappy day and found myself drifting uncontrollably along the coast. I had to fight to get back in, and when I finally did, I took an embarrassing walk back in a wet swimsuit to my abandoned bag and towel, for what felt like miles. Today is a drenching day, with spray constantly buffeting my face and the wind in my ears. I am bobbing on the surface like a bottle, thrown in different directions. When I finally manage to clear my vision, I see, quite unexpectedly, that I am looming close to one of the enormous wooden structures that divide the beach into strips, close enough to feel a premonition of my cheek lashing against it. I turn and manage to kick awkwardly away, only to be drawn irresistibly towards it again. The tide is on the retreat, and although each wave tosses me forwards, I am also sucked backwards before it arrives. Everything is moving at a diagonal to the beach. This is ridiculous: I'm only a few yards away from solid ground, but it's so hard to get there. If I can't swim to safety, then I will have to climb. I allow myself to bounce into the wave break again, but this time I cling to the wood, two hands gripping the top and my feet braced against the side. From there, I reach down a tentative shin to steady myself and I crawl back across it on bloodied knees until I reach dry land. When I want to feel small, I go to the sea at its lowest ebb. It's a skill peculiar to living near the coast, to have an innate 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. In the early hours of 13 November 1833, those who were awake shared an extraordinary sight. According to the New York Evening Post, it seemed that "the cape of heaven was raining down a shower of fire" over the eastern states of America. Shooting stars came in such density that "the whole firmament appeared to be in motion with them, as if the planets and constellations were falling from their places." Witnesses experienced a bombardment of light so intense and tangible that they fully expected their houses to catch fire. The stars did not appear to be falling in some dark, abstract space, but right above the heads of the folk who watched, and cowered, and prayed. Water teaches us about surrender and strength, about knowing when to resist and when to yield. My struggles in the sea remind me how far I've drifted from understanding my relationship with the forces that surround me. I can no longer tell whether my sense of fragility comes from within or is reflected back to me from a world in constant flux. Like the early witnesses of the Leonid meteor shower, we are confronted by cosmic forces that exceed our comprehension, leaving us simultaneously awed and humbled. The journey back to enchantment requires us to unlearn our illusion of control. We must rediscover how to move with the currents rather than against them, to recognize the patterns and rhythms that govern all life. Water teaches us that flow is not just a metaphor but a fundamental state of being - one that asks us to remain present, attentive, and adaptable to forces greater than ourselves. Only then can we begin to feel at home again in the vast, interconnected web of existence.

Chapter 4: Fire: The Burning Need for Deep Play and Engagement

In the last years of the eighteenth century, J. Lud. Jordan decided to ascend the Brocken, the highest mountain in northern Germany. The Harz mountain range could be a forbidding place, rife with legends of witches and demons, but on this day in late May it was beautiful. Setting out before dawn, he watched the sky redden, and then the sun seemed to burst from the horizon, rendering the landscape—and the walker—serene. A mist began to gather around the mountains below him, soon becoming a thick fog. He climbed the Teufelskanzel, the Devil's Pulpit, an outcrop of granite that Goethe had used as the setting for a satanic orgy in Faust. Standing at the top, he looked over towards the peak of the Wormberg and saw something that stopped his breath: a figure of a giant man standing as if on a pedestal. It was a fleeting vision. Even as Jordan watched, the mists thinned below him and the apparition vanished. What he had witnessed was a Brocken Spectre - his own shadow cast onto cloud cover by a low-lying sun, stretched out into eerie proportions by the angle of projection. The shifting nature of the clouds and mists onto which they are projected means that the spectres can appear to move in curious ways, and we find it hard to judge how far away the shadow actually is. I am still unable to read. Reading is the whole of me, the foundation upon which I rest, and these days I cannot do it. It is a dirty secret that I must keep, an ugly act of faithlessness in an author. I do not want to read. I cannot read. I cannot shepherd my attention towards a page of text and take in any words. I cannot complete a whole chapter without my consciousness excusing itself and quietly retreating into an inner sanctum to which I have no access. I cannot sit still. I cannot concentrate. Surely this is some kind of a malady for which there ought to be a cure? My lack of reading is a furtive thing, a fugitive state of being that I must not show to the people who know me. I feel disordered by it, the familiar world sliding out from my grasp. It is not as though I'm doing something else instead. I have not transferred my allegiance to Netflix. I am just not reading. There is a gaping void where I used to rest my mind. I have begun to notice this malady in other people, too. I have been asking, slyly, for recommendations that would rekindle my passion, and nobody seems to know. Those literary friends of mine—those other readers, my people, who usually fizz with excitement about one book or another—are drawing a blank. In his 1973 essay "Deep Play," Clifford Geertz captures the multilayered nature of profound attention. For Geertz, deep play is a game in which the players are in over their heads, usually with money at stake, but also with all the matters of status: "esteem, honour, dignity, respect." It is, on the face of it, a leisure activity, but one that encapsulates the whole symbolic universe of the people who partake. I think Geertz missed a trick. He made the boundaries of deep play too solid. I see deep play everywhere, expressed in infinite ways. It captures, for me, a quality of attention that is unexpected in adult life, and which we barely even recognise in children. Like the Brocken Spectre - a shadow of ourselves projected onto the natural world - our lost capacity for deep engagement reveals something profound about our current condition. We have become disconnected from the fire of passionate attention that once animated our lives. Whether through reading, creative pursuits, or meaningful work, we crave the transformative heat of complete immersion in something that matters to us. Fire represents both destruction and creation, burning away what no longer serves us while igniting new possibilities. Our inability to concentrate isn't merely a personal failing but a collective response to a world that has become increasingly fragmented and anxiety-inducing. To rediscover enchantment, we must reclaim our capacity for deep play - those states of complete absorption that connect us to our essential selves and to the world around us. When we allow ourselves to be fully engaged, we find that the boundaries between self and other, subject and object, begin to dissolve. In these moments of flow, we touch something elemental and regenerative that has the power to transform our relationship with life itself.

Chapter 5: Air: Capturing Invisible Magic in a Tangible World

We have just made it into the air when someone peels an orange, and the whole plane fills with the scent of quiet afternoons with my grandmother. I know this trick: it is a ward against travel sickness. I have always been unsettled in motion. I like my feet on solid ground. I have queasily peeled oranges on coaches, cross-channel ferries, and the back seats of cars. I sometimes catch their potency in a paper bag to concentrate the effect. An orange cuts through nausea like a scalpel, even if the effect is only temporary. I can always meditate on trains, but never in planes. It is not a simple matter of movement. It is instead about contact. Mid-air, my attention has nowhere to sink—just an unsteady void below, seven miles of nothing. Up here, I cannot put down roots. I am in transit, in a state between two solidities. Flying feels like an intermission in the real business of living. The problem is that air is strange to us. We do not understand its formlessness, its transparency. Its meanings pass too easily through our fingers. I'm back to the classroom, but this time without the folders and books, the rulers and highlighter pens. I am trying to learn through my hands. This is not how I was trained, and I am twitchy with the need to inscribe a margin down the side of clean white paper, and to transform the words coming out of the lecturer's mouth into my untidy handwriting, preferably verbatim. I have fallen foul of this urge before. My first week of university, I attended an introductory lecture from a very famous sociologist who told us not to take notes, just to listen. I took notes anyway. I didn't trust listening. It was prone to decomposition over time. I am told that in Singapore, the dandelions so often cursed by English gardeners are traded on eBay for good money. Those who buy them are in awe of the delicate orbs of their seed heads and admire the bounty of a plant whose leaves and petals are both edible. What is invisible in one place is beautiful in another. We even degrade them in their naming—in colloquial English, a dandelion (itself deriving from dent de lion, or lion's tooth, referring to its jagged leaves) is a wet-the-bed. I think I've always loved dandelions as much as the Singaporeans, possibly because I've never much revered a pristine lawn. For my last birthday, somebody gave me a packet of wildflower seeds tucked inside a card. I am not much of a gardener. I don't have a neat potting shed with trays of saved seeds. I left the packet on the kitchen worktop, and when, after a week, a cup of tea got spilled on it, I nearly threw it out. But I reasoned that there was no harm in scattering them across the garden—there was a small chance of flowers this way, and zero chance if I put them in the bin. So I cast them out across the dirt and hoped the rain would take them into the soil. Air represents the realm of the invisible - all that we cannot see but nonetheless impacts our lives profoundly. Like the scent of an orange that can transform our experience of travel, or the seeds that might bloom into unexpected beauty, air carries potential that requires faith to appreciate. It reminds us that much of life's magic exists beyond our immediate perception, in the spaces between tangible realities. Our modern mindset tends to dismiss what cannot be measured or captured. We value the concrete over the ephemeral, the proven over the possible. Yet air teaches us that some of the most powerful forces in our lives - love, inspiration, connection - exist beyond the reach of our ordinary senses. To rediscover enchantment, we must develop a relationship with air's invisible qualities, learning to trust in what we cannot see but can nonetheless feel. Whether through the practice of meditation, the appreciation of fragrance, or the act of planting seeds with no guarantee of growth, we open ourselves to the mysterious currents that flow through and around us, connecting past to future, memory to possibility.

Chapter 6: Integration: Becoming Keepers of What Truly Matters

It is already two days past the peak of the Lyrids when we head out into the night to find them. Bert takes an early bath, and we put him in the car dressed in pyjamas and a hoodie, ready to crawl straight into bed when we get back. With the sun low in the sky, we drive out of the town where we've rented a house and into the wilds of Exmoor, roads narrowing and acres of wild scrubland stretching out before us. The greener fields are full of ewes and their lambs, and in some places they fill the roadside verges, too, chewing on the grass and shedding their wool all over the prickly gorse. We park at Holdstone Down and walk uphill along a stony path as the sky darkens. Above my head, the aether is a thin blue, streaking orange towards the horizon. As we reach the crest, the land falls away before us, giving way to a restless grey sea and a ladder of cliffs fading into the distance. Bert is entranced by the cairn that sits at the peak of the hill, the first one he's seen. He's got lucky. Most of the cairns I've ever come across have been at the summit of a long climb or in a spot so remote that walkers have felt compelled to mark the occasion of their passing-through. We had to walk for only five minutes. Cairns are spontaneous, shifting monuments to a hundred different things. A bunch of browning flowers is secured under one of the stones, facing seaward. I show Bert that he can add a stone of his own, and he does, and then adds one for every member of his family: for me, for Daddy, for Grandma, for the cats and for the dog—all the beings he treasures. And just like that, he makes his own ritual, an act of invention and a gesture of connection. He doesn't need to be shown this. He knows already. What he needs, as he grows older, is continuing permission to map meaning across the landscape. The wind has picked up and the sky still isn't dark, so we pad back down the path to the car. There are no stars yet, and the moon is now high and invasively bright. H remembers a lay-by a little farther along the road where he thinks we'll have a better view of Lyra. According to an app on my phone, the constellation is now rising to the north-east, still low in the sky. We drive a little way and park again. Turning off all the lights, we watch the sky darken through the windows, and we see the first stars come out. And then I notice it, pooling at our feet. I say to H, "You've left the headlights on. No wonder we can't see anything." But as he shifts to find his keys, I realise that the lights are not on. So where do they come from, the shadows that flow down the cliff from our shoes? It takes me a few beats to realise that it must be the moon. "Look!" I say to Bert. "Our moon shadow!" We are, collectively, a little bit amazed, and we step left and right, and raise our arms to prove it's really true. I have gone looking for one thing and found another, not something rare and celestial and beyond my control, but something that was always within my power to find. Integration isn't merely about bringing together disparate elements of our experience. It's about becoming active participants in creating meaning - becoming keepers of what truly matters. In a world that encourages passive consumption and endless distraction, the simple act of paying attention becomes revolutionary. When we take the time to stand beneath the night sky with a child, build a cairn with intentionality, or notice our moon shadows dancing on the ground, we reclaim our role as meaning-makers. The path to enchantment doesn't require extraordinary circumstances or dramatic revelations. It simply asks us to be present to the wonder that already surrounds us - in the changing seasons, in human connection, in the quiet moments between breaths. By cultivating this attentiveness, we weave ourselves back into the fabric of existence, recognizing that we are not separate observers but integral participants in a living, breathing world. Integration means accepting that we are both keepers of ancient wisdom and creators of new meaning, responsible for tending the sacred flames of wonder that illuminate our shared journey through this mysterious life.

Summary

Enchantment isn't found in grand gestures or distant horizons but in the patient attention we bring to ordinary moments. When we slow down enough to notice the way light filters through morning fog, or how an orange's scent can transport us across decades, or the magic of watching our shadows stretch across moonlit ground, we begin to recover our innate capacity for wonder. This rediscovery isn't merely aesthetic pleasure but a profound reconnection with the world and ourselves. By learning to see the sacred in the everyday – through ritual, deep play, attentive listening, and meaningful connection – we cultivate resilience against the anxieties of modern life. The journey toward re-enchantment offers practical wisdom for navigating our fragmented times. First, we must recognize that attentiveness is a skill that requires practice – whether through meditation, creative expression, or simply spending time in nature. Second, we need communities of meaning where our sense of wonder can be validated and strengthened through shared experience. Finally, we must embrace a certain humility, acknowledging that not everything can or should be explained, measured, or controlled. When we learn to inhabit the mystery rather than trying to solve it, we discover that enchantment isn't something we find but something we become – a way of moving through the world with openness, curiosity, and reverence for the extraordinary gift of being alive.

About Author

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Katherine May

Katherine May is an internationally bestselling author and podcaster living in Whitstable, UK. Her hybrid memoir Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times became a New York Times, Sunday Times and Der Spiegel bestseller, was adapted as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week, and was shortlisted for the Porchlight and Barnes and Noble Book of the Year. The Electricity of Every Living Thing, her memoir of a midlife autism diagnosis, is currently being adapted as an audio drama by Audible. Other titles include novels such as The Whitstable High Tide Swimming Club, and The Best, Most Awful Job, an anthology of essays about motherhood which she edited. Her journalism and essays have appeared in a range of publications including The New York Times, The Observer and Aeon.Katherine’s podcast, The Wintering Sessions, ranks in the top 1% worldwide, and she has been a guest presenter for On Being’s The Future of Hope series. Her next book, Enchantment, will be published in 2023.Katherine lives with her husband, son, two cats and a dog. She loves walking, sea-swimming and pickling slightly unappealing things.

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Wintering

Katherine May

The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

★★★½☆3.8