Fresh Take: Katherine May on "Enchantment"

FT 122 Katherine May Transcript

[00:00:00] Margaret: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Fresh Take from "What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood." This is Margaret.

[00:00:08] Amy: And this is Amy. And today we are delighted to welcome back to the podcast, Katherine May. She is the author of the runaway bestseller "Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times," which has been translated into 25 languages. Her new book is "Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age." Katherine lives by the sea in Whitstable, England. Welcome back, Katherine.

[00:00:33] Katherine May: Thank you for having me. I was just telling Margaret, I think I'm a friend of the show officially now.

[00:00:38] Margaret: Absolutely - returning champ, as we say, our returning champion, Katherine May. No pressure.

[00:00:44] Amy: This is one of these books, Katherine, that you read and you just nod along on every page. You start the book exactly where I'm starting this interview in a place - what you call - post-Covid numbness. Take us through what that is and how that manifested for you.

[00:01:01] Katherine May: Yeah, it was a funny time actually, because on one hand I was really ready to go back out into the world, and I felt like my brain couldn't work properly without seeing other people, but at the same time, I had this strong feeling that I didn't wanna return to life as it was. And the pace of the real world felt unbearable. And I think I was really stuck somewhere in between. Time just didn't work for me. I didn't have that same desire to go out and all my rhythms were out, you know, I was just out of the habit of leaving the house.

[00:01:33] Amy: And we had such a hard time getting used to it. And then this is what happens when we try to get back, right? That there's a pandemic hangover, which wasn't just as in you couldn't leave the house. I mean, you said you couldn't read a book. This is exactly what I identified with. I wanna read a book. The book is sitting there. It's a good book. I'd love to read it, but I can't read a page without reaching for my phone or staring dully into space. Why do you think that happened for so many of us?

[00:01:57] Katherine May: Yeah. I mean, I just felt like my attention glanced off everything I tried to focus on. And I, it seems to me that's a sort of artifact of fear - that we're afraid of this stuff that's kinda coming for us. And you know, some of us it touched more closely than others, but there's this constant sense that if I haven't got my eyes on the news, or if I haven't got my eyes on, you know, where my family are at the moment, then I'm not safe. And I don't that they're safe. And you know, if you think about it in that context, it's not that surprising that we found it so hard to do something more gentle, like reading a book or watching a movie. We're in this constant state of urgency and almost physically looking over our shoulder all the time.

[00:02:41] Margaret: Yeah. And a sort of combination to some degree of urgent boredom. It's a very pervasive anxiety, but a very kind of diffuse anxiety too. It's not the anxiety of "Tomorrow is the biggest exam I'll take in my life," which at least has an action feeling. This is a [00:03:00] kind of overwhelming yet passive anxiety, there's no real action to take in response to it. And for me that staring into space, I don't wanna do anything feeling very much came from the nature of the anxiety, which was sort of everywhere, but very hard to grab onto at the same time.

[00:03:20] Katherine May: Everything everywhere, all at once.

[00:03:22] Margaret: Yes, exactly.

[00:03:23] Katherine May: It's kinda diffuse, isn't it? And I think for loads of us, it's rolled on into this period now, you know, we haven't let go of that sense of threat cause we've kinda, we've learned it on a cellular level now and you know, I don't think it honestly just came from the pandemic. I think we were already living with elevated levels of fear and this sense the world is changing so much and is so unknown to us now and is frightening. It's really significant, isn't it, that just as we were coming out of a pandemic and beginning to emerge from that, the war in Ukraine kicked off and it's almost like, I mean, God knows what that's like for Ukrainians, but even for those of us who were very far away from it and very protected from its effects, there's this sense of collapse of the world just grinding on and it not getting better, it becoming more and more menacing, and then of course now we're beginning to look at pandemics of other things. I mean, we could do without avian flu, frankly.

[00:04:22] Margaret: Yes, thank you.

[00:04:23] Katherine May: No, thank you, avian flu.

[00:04:26] Margaret: I said to my mental health professional, I definitely had that feeling of in the movie, like the shipwrecked person gets to the shore and I looked up and it was like "War." Again, very removed and protected from it, but it felt like when the pandemic's over, everything will be okay. And then it just felt like, nope, we're rolling into another very uncertain time.

[00:04:47] Amy: I do look back on the puzzles and the movie nights, and we were sort of putting on a brave face to make our families feel safe. I mean, I was very frightened. We had serious Covid illness in our house. It was terrible. But the puzzles were nice, right? In a way, maybe because it was real and it was active and it was happening, it was easier to find the silver lining. This is something different, what you're saying afterwards, right? Like I haven't done a puzzle in a year now, and I kind of liked doing puzzles, but I can't do puzzles. I can't make myself do it. Like we've survived it and now comes this weird static in our brains all the time. So why does that happen after the hard part?

[00:05:23] Katherine May: Because like things that we did to make it better were actually quite exhausting in themselves. You know, they didn't come naturally, really, did they? They were, they were a big act of organization to often try and make stuff okay for isolated older parents, you know, doing Zoom dinners, or to make kids feel safer. But I think decomposed over time and the will to do that organization felt more and more effortful. I mean, I tried to set up an online movie club with some friends and I think we watched two movies and after the third one we were just like, nah, let's just not do this again. Let's just do it separately.

[00:05:59] Margaret: We [00:06:00] did one. We did exactly one. My whole family. And then people were kind of trying to talk and it was like, "Wait, what'd you say? We gotta pause the movie." It was a mess.

[00:06:07] Katherine May: It was a mess. It's really interesting, I think, to reflect on that now. I mean, obviously the pandemic isn't over, but that acute phase is. And it seems to have done something permanent to us. And I think for some people that's trauma. But I think for other people it's about changed habits and really fundamentally changed ways of living and at the same time, this kind of consciousness that we don't wanna go back to exactly the same as before. And therefore: what now? What do we do if we don't have a pattern to follow? And that's part of that drifting, lost feeling that we're all quite haunted by.

[00:06:44] Margaret: And I think even in a practical way - I live in a commuter town outside of Manhattan, and it used to be 7:30 in the morning, the cars filled up the lot, everybody went to the city, they came back.

And then on the weekends we would ride our bikes at the parking lot because nobody was there, and we now ride our bikes there Wednesdays - it's empty. People have really changed the way they live their lives and people are also making tremendous adjustments, still having a spouse at home. And is that good or bad? And working from home. And is that a positive or negative? I think the reckoning of how much things have changed - we're not dialed in on as much, because we're like, okay, that happened and now we're all moving on. But when I look around, things are very different than they were.

[00:07:31] Katherine May: It's been a source of big conflict as well. I think that, you know, people not wanting to go back to the workplace - I know a lot of people have ended up in conflict with their managers over that. And I dunno about you, but my house now, I don't have a very big house. I mean, my household's very full. I've always worked from home. So it's been my domain in the daytime and I love that. But now my husband's home too. Which means we've lost another bedroom. And so everything feels very packed in, you know, that's stressful, but it's actually distracting too. And I think we're all getting less personal space. And I, from all the people I know, I think a lot of us are still dogged with ill health after the pandemic too. You know, we might have had Covid or we've had one of these other, you know, mess of diseases that seem to be passing through. All immune systems don't seem to be what they used to be. And like literally everyone I know this winter has had thing after thing, after thing, after thing, back to back, and I'm hearing so many people, like, "I haven't felt well since September," and that's normally delivered with a hacking cough. And yeah, there's stuff going on that I don't think we're really talking about in the mainstream, and we haven't acknowledged the burden of grief that is floating among us that was never fully expressed during the lockdown phase, and which now is - the time has passed for it. But of course, it's still absolutely present in the people that have lost someone in the most traumatic circumstances.

[00:08:59] Amy: We're [00:09:00] talking to Katherine May. She's the author of the new book, "Enchantment." There is another way to live, at least Katherine thinks so, and we're gonna talk more about that when we get back.

So Katherine, we know we're soaking in it, as we like to say in the States. We are bathing in this feeling, and you lay it out so clearly in the book, but you started to get curious about what's the way out of this? Is there another way to live, to cut through the brain fog, and how did you even sort of develop that question for yourself and then start to move through it?

[00:09:29] Katherine May: I think I got to a point where I absolutely had to. I reached such a stopping point that I knew I needed to do something. I also knew that my resolve wasn't very good about it, and at some point along the line I put a post-it note above my desk that said "Go for a walk" because I'd realized I'd had this insight that I was struggling to get out from under my desk, like even when I didn't actually have something to do. It made me feel like I was being productive to be sitting at my desk and staring at my laptop screen and like maybe looking at Pinterest endlessly, which I do occasionally still engage in. But I realized that I had to change my habit really, and I needed that initial impetus. And so one day when I was just choked with anxiety, I saw the post-it note and I was like, "Right, come on, you left a message to your future self. Let's go." You know, sometimes you've got to listen to your own advice, haven't you? And I'd gone to the effort of writing it down. So, yeah, so I walked up to the top of my town where a new Village Green has been established. Our town is growing, and so they've made this new space. I was curious to see that they had installed this stone circle. You know, Britain is full of beautiful ancient stone circles, but this is our newest one. And I wanted to go and see, go and visit it, go and see what it was like. And I'd been there before. So yeah, I was just curious. I went up there not expecting much, but actually changing that space, changing that habit had a huge effect on me and I ended up taking off my shoes to walk barefoot. I needed to sense my environment a bit more and it set me thinking about how we worship these days. You know, like how we don't really know what to do anymore. We don't have a place to go that we feel part of in the way that perhaps our ancestors would've done. But instead we're reaching for something, we're reaching for a new practice, we're reaching for a new way of understanding life. And I think that set a lot of this book in train really just having that experience of getting outside and knowing the effect it had on my body. But thinking about that bigger question of like: how do we make space for our minds to roam in now - and space that feels joyful and comforting and stimulating and opens up reflection?

[00:11:55] Margaret: In talking about the nature of the pandemic, what I loved about "Wintering" was that [00:12:00] it's okay to find this cozy space. I think for me, during quarantine, I really enjoyed the locked down part of it for myself in terms of: I am free from expectations. I am in my little circle of trust with my five people who I feel safe with, and then I think in a negative way came down into literally like I'm physically rounding my shoulders over my phone, over my Twitter, over my doom-scrolling. But that felt safe to me. That kind of hunched over, closed-in posture of quarantine was really pleasing to me in a way, but not really good for me in a way, and this idea of opening back up and finding something that is outside that is not scary, that is wondrous, but I think that that process has been really challenging for me. I liked that tucked-in all together feeling.

[00:12:59] Katherine May: It sounds like you were doing lots of monitoring as well. It sounds like you were watching lots of different people and lots of bits of news around the world, which I think has been almost a substitute for feeling safe for us.

[00:13:09] Margaret: Or somehow it's like a self stimulation of safety. Like if I'm the person keeping track of everything, I will not be hurt by anything because I will know where the tanks are going and how the pandemic is going, and if the avian flu is gonna be...that I've put myself in charge of huddling over the news and being the keeper of that for everyone.

[00:13:29] Katherine May: Yeah. The watcher or the keeper of that world is such a truth. I think a lot of us have come to believe that if our eyeballs are on whatever situation is making the world feel afraid that it'll be okay as long as we're watching. But of course, you know, our modern news media just gives us twenty-four hours a day of so much to watch. I don't think we were set up to process this amount of news. I mean, even in previous war times, and certainly previous pandemics, we would've only got the news once a day from a newspaper. Or you know, even until recently, TV news was on at breakfast time and mid-afternoon, and that was it. That was the end of it. That was all the news that you could possibly find. And in between you were free to not know about the news, and now we can just watch and we can also watch on social media as people are telling us their personal news. You know, I watched so many unfolding tragedies. But you said about that shape of your body as you did it, and that's so significant. You know, we were all rolled up into these little balls around our phone and our shoulders were hunched over. And when you're doing that, you can barely breathe. And everything was constrained. You know, "Enchantment" is such a book about re-inhabiting my body after a long time - a whole lifetime of living in my head actually. Like not just the pandemic, just existing in my head.

[00:14:55] Margaret: Because the physicality of opening your body, your belly, your chest [00:15:00] is vulnerable. That's literally like a dog rolling on its belly to get scratches is saying, I trust you because I can open my body. Moving and the way you talk about kind of moving back into the world. It involves that vulnerability. And it was helpful for me to recognize.

[00:15:16] Amy: "Enchantment is small wonder, magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory." And this makes me think of playing in the backyard as a small child and saying, you know, this is my tree house and this is my den. And Margaret's daughter was very sure that fairies were part of her life for several years. You know, just that sort of "Anything can happen" and possibility. It sounds very unachievable, right? It sounds to me, coming to this, very like: "Oh yeah, I did that when I was seven, but that's for somebody who's seven. That's not for somebody who's 47 and has, you know, important, grownup things to worry about all the time."

[00:15:55] Katherine May: I'm tired.

[00:15:56] Amy: Right. But is that what you're saying? Like we need to get back to that in a directly childlike sense, or is there something else?

[00:16:02] Katherine May: I think we knew how to do it as children, and what we often miss out on is letting it grow with us because actually returning to that same childlike experience of wonder isn't enough for us as adults, and actually what we need to do when we're in our forties for sure is make more complex meanings that take in all of the dark stuff that we've just talked about actually, that acknowledge it as part of life and weave it into our understanding. And that's sometimes comprised of very simple experiences, you know, like holding a stone and just enjoying the beauty of that, the beauty of the stone to your eyes, but also how beautiful it feels in your hand. Like, it can still be very pure and simple, but it also can be full of other stories. And that's what kind of interlinks us to mythology and to our knowledge of the landscape and our knowledge of our local area and the other people that we know, and it's about finding a way to play as an adult in the way that we could play as children, but transposed up to adulthood. We definitely need that much more nuanced understanding of the world than we once would've done.

[00:17:17] Margaret: The idea that you talk about that wonder and enchantment does not have to be sparked by grand things - that sometimes wonder feels like it only lives at the edge of the Grand Canyon if we can get our budget together and save up and go there...I'm directing a play right now and I was at the rehearsal the other night - very dingy, dark room, - and I was thinking of the book while we were just sitting there doing this run-through...just the power of 16 people trying to tell a story together in a room. It just, I was like, this is it. This is enchantment. This is wonder. It's not only that I have to go to the top of the Empire State Building and take in the wondrous view [00:18:00] of the five boroughs. Amy says this all the time, right? It's like, gathering information, you find what you're looking for. Having just read the book and sitting in this very dingy room with these, you know, not well-dressed actors, and just the wonder, I was like, here it is. When you're looking for wonder, it helps you to find it.

[00:18:19] Katherine May: Yeah, I think that really nails it for me. There's that sense that we can kind of - that Enchantment is like a holiday that we have to buy our way to, you know, and it's expensive and it's once in a lifetime. I dunno about you, but I've had so many underwhelming experiences at places that are supposed to be extraordinary. You know, I can tell you visually they're gonna look nice in the photos, but they've left me emotionally cold, actually. I think that's because we put so much weight on stuff that's really distant. Rather than going looking for that sense that we need every day. And it's funny to me because one of the contrasts I think between how I experience that as a child and how I experience that as an adult is that as a child, I hated those kind of thoughts that made me feel small. You know, like when someone first explained to me that the universe is probably infinite. And I couldn't sleep for days after hearing that. It horrified me. Like, I can't make any sense of that. I can't unravel it. Like how, what do I mean in that context? And now as an adult, I'm really comforted by that, you know, like my sense of self-importance as a child was really elevated. And now as an adult I'm yearning for those kind of conceptions that humble me and that make me feel like the weight is lifted off my shoulders and that I no longer have to see myself as holding the weight of the world. And that's a real shift that I've made. I'm looking for ways to feel small and to notice how amazing everything is around me.

[00:19:54] Amy: Enchantment is, in a sense, it's something that requires not just to be struck by the beauty of the Northern Lights, but something that we can cultivate by deliberate attention. When we come back, I wanna ask Katherine more about how we can transform our ability to be enchanted.

So Katherine, I've been thinking about this book, too. I live in New York City. The book definitely talks a lot about the importance of being outside in nature and connecting with the names of birds and plants and things. And that's something that has felt to me sort of unreachable in New York City. But right now there's an owl loose in Central Park right now.

[00:20:31] Margaret: Yes. The famous owl.

[00:20:32] Amy: His name is Flaco. He escaped from the zoo about six weeks ago, but he stayed in Central Park and for a while they were trying to recapture him and nothing they were doing was working. Meanwhile, he was, you know, pooping and like giving other signs of "I know what I'm doing out here."

[00:20:46] Margaret: I'm all set guys. I'm Flaco, I'm good. I'm gonna live in Central Park. It's fine.

[00:20:50] Amy: So eventually they're like, alright. I guess Flaco is gonna just live in the park now. We're not gonna try to recapture him. He seems to be fine. And it's given me - 'cause I try to make myself go for a walk even when I don't want [00:21:00] to. But it's given me something to do. Like, I'm looking for Flaco when I go on these walks and I haven't found him yet, but one of these days I'm gonna see him in a tree. That sort of point of focus has helped me exponentially increase my excitement and enchantment about being in the park as I could see Flaco. Is that how we sort of increase this? Do we set our mind to: "I'm going to notice something deliberately today," or do you keep yourself completely open? How does it work for you?

[00:21:22] Katherine May: It's such a good example actually, because one of the things I always say is that to find enchantment, you follow the lines of your curiosity. And Flaco is like a mass curiosity event. Everyone just wants to have eyes on him. He sounds amazing. I would totally be there looking for him if it was up to me and yeah, it's that sense of like, what are you drawn to and what excites you? And then I love the way that people have made meaning around this owl - like, people are using him to talk about freedom and escape and what they would do if they had their day in the sun. You know? And there's been this sort of attitude projected onto him that he's sort of, you know, he's quite sassy. Right? Sassy, as owls go. But that's exactly what I mean. And I visited New York City in the summer and I found so many things to be completely fascinated by. I've always loved those great big outcrops of rock in the middle of Central Park. Like, they've got no place being there, but there they are, and suddenly right in the middle of the city, you feel like you're in this raw space where the earth is rising up, you know, beneath your feet. And I find that completely extraordinary.

[00:22:29] Amy: It's funny you say that because my little brother - this is 20 years ago, gosh, more than - he came to visit me and I had, we were gonna go to the top of the Empire State Building, we're gonna do this - I had 18 things for him to do. I was not a parent yet, but he's a much younger sibling. Anyway, we got to Central Park and those big rocks in Central Park. He was good. Six hours climbing on those rocks while I'm, like, tapping my foot and looking at my watch. "We have an appointment here. We're going here!"

[00:22:53] Margaret: You don't have time for wonder!

[00:22:54] Amy: Right, right. Sort of was like, "Oh, this is it. He's happy. Like, I brought him to New York for him to experience things that made him happy and excited. This rock, which I've never thought about before. We're gonna just be here all day while he climbs on this rock, but who cares?" And that was a huge thunderbolt for me, but just interesting you mentioned it because I was blind to how interesting they were, but an eight-year-old child was like, "Whoa!" and just thought they were amazing.

[00:23:17] Katherine May: Yeah. I find them mind-blowing and you know, it's these things that sometimes we need fresh eyes to help us to see them. I would want to know, you know, what kind of rocks they are when they formed, what that means, like, what the process by which those rocks got there and how and what did that landscape look like before it was so built up? I mean, someone told me recently the sort of main avenue running up Manhattan is actually really ancient and was used long before, you know, the British and Dutch came. Yeah. It's all of those things, you know, they take us into our recent and deep past. They make links between people across millennia. They link us deeply to nature, and they show [00:24:00] us this earth that is rolling underneath our feet, outside of our control, and outside of all the building we do around it. And yeah, that to me, that gets right at the heart of enchantment.

[00:24:11] Margaret: Another way I was thinking about this book is, well, we live in the suburbs, but there's some forest around us. I mean, woods - really trees, but there's deer who come -

[00:24:21] Katherine May: You've downgraded down to a tree?

[00:24:24] Margaret: Well, I was like, we live in the forest. Let's be honest. There's a train that runs right there. There's some trees, but there is a family of deer and our kids have named all the deer. So there's Fendlan the deer, and he's kind of the bully deer. And we watch them and we know these deer and we have stories about them. And then recently, we got a little chip for our cat that goes on her collar. It's not an implant, it just sits on her collar - and we can watch where she goes at night. She wanders and then sometimes we go walk her route. She goes a mile every night. She walks all over. I think that sometimes animals can do this for us and our children: what is our cat's life like? What is Fendlan's life like? The deer who comes by - what kind of schedule are they operating on? And it connects you to a world that is at once immediate, but bigger somehow than the world of hunching over your phone.

[00:25:18] Katherine May: But I think to give a different example as well: I mean, the other thing that I find in New York City that I always go to see when I'm there is Monet's water lilies. The first time I went to see that, I'd gone - my dad lived in New York for a while and I'd gone to visit him in the summer and he'd said, take the train from Long Island, you know, take the train and go and see museums or something. And I'd seen a hundred photos of that painting and I'd never thought it was very interesting at all. I always thought it was a rather polite piece of work that was nothing to do with me. Like, I wanted to see more radical stuff than that. I remember walking into that room the first time, and I mean, it's enormous, but also noticing how spacious the brush work is and how the color speaks to each other and clashes against itself and creates something entirely different to its component part. And having this moment of like, "I get it!" Like, I felt this direct line of communication with the artist, but also with all people who loved it and was a real kind of peak moment for me of just encountering the force of this piece of art, and I took my son back to see it this time and he was not interested in them. I was sure that it had to have a massive impression on him cause it had such a massive impression on me. But it made no dent in him because he hadn't seen like other examples of it. He had no expectation of it. He was just like, yeah, it's a little painting - fun, you know? And he was off and about to look at something more interesting.

[00:26:49] Margaret: That's an interesting data point, I think, as a parent. As we talk about the Disneys or the, like, built city of wonder that you're gonna go to. [00:27:00] Wonder is very individual, right? What makes other people light up in that synapse level? It's not the same for everyone and you can share your wonder with other people, but different things spark it for different people, which is really interesting.

[00:27:16] Katherine May: Yeah, it's definitely subjective and actually that's no bad thing because it is this very personal, intimate relationship that you foster over a long period of time. One of our problems, I think, is that we're waiting for people to hand it to us. And so much about our culture tells us like, these are the things you're supposed to feel excited by. And the other things are a bit silly. And I think that's actually one of the things that really undermines our ability to authentically feel it, and not just to kind of enact it, because this is the moment when we're supposed to feel great about everything. And yeah, you can't be didactic about enchantment. It's something, it's a relationship you have to create for yourself and have to nurture over the course of your life.

[00:28:01] Amy: We've been talking to Katherine May, her brand new book is "Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age." Katherine, tell us where our listeners can find you and your book.

[00:28:11] Katherine May: You can find my book in all the bookstores and you can find me - probably the best place these days I think is at my substack which is katherinemay.substack.com. So I write three newsletters a fortnight, which I realize is an odd rhythm to write a newsletter in, but that's the one that works for me.

[00:28:26] Margaret: All of our listeners are Googling "how long is a fortnight?" right now.

[00:28:29] Katherine May: You don't say fortnight? What?

[00:28:31] Margaret: We do not say fortnight.

[00:28:33] Katherine May: It's two weeks.

[00:28:34] Margaret: Yeah. Two weeks. Okay guys, two weeks is a fortnight. Don't tell us we didn't ever teach you anything.

[00:28:40] Katherine May: Honestly, how is it that we are supposed to speak a common language, so few words we have in common.

[00:28:45] Margaret: I know. Not even close. Then next you're gonna tell us how many stones something is and then we're really gonna be in trouble.

[00:28:52] Katherine May: Can I tell everyone about my podcast? Cause if they love yours, they might like mine. I've got a podcast called "How We Live Now," where we talk about the kind of questions that are coming up for all of us and I invite lots of different guests to share their view on it. I really enjoy doing that. One of my favorite things right now.

[00:29:08] Margaret: Fantastic. We will link to all of those places in our show notes to make it very easy to find. Katherine, thank you for coming back, official friend of the podcast, Katherine May. It was so great talking to you again.

[00:29:22] Katherine May: Yes. Well, I'm delighted to be invited back and I hope to come back another time when I've managed to write another book. You never know.

[00:29:31] Margaret: Absolutely. You're first on our list.