Enchantment

Re-awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

By Katherine May

Category: Motivation & Inspiration | Reading Duration: 18 min | Rating: 4.1/5 (62 ratings)

About the Book

Enchantment (2023) asks how – in a world of toxic social media, rolling news coverage, burnout, stress, and anxiety – we can spark feelings of wonder, magic, and miracle. It suggests that discovering a connection with nature and rekindling our connection to our own inner selves will awaken our ability to be enchanted by the world.

Who Should Read This?

• Anxious scrollers who can’t seem to tear themselves from their newsfeeds
• Burnt-out workers, parents, and carers who have lost their spark
• Anyone who feels disconnected from nature and community

What’s in it for me? Fall under the world’s spell once more.…

Can you remember a time, most likely in early childhood, when even small delights, like eating ice cream or stargazing made the world feel positively magical? What happened to that sense of wonder?Enchantment is a feeling of connectedness with the glorious and mysterious scope of possibilities the world offers. Unfortunately, today’s cultural climate often conspires to make us feel anything but connected to the natural world. We live small, disconnected lives; encouraged to rationalize the world’s mysteries away and scorn anything irrational or unquantifiable.But perhaps you – like the poet and memoirist Katherine May did – sense a hard-to-define, yet increasingly painful, absence in your life. The absence of rhythm, ritual, wonder – the absence of an old kind of magic, that in earlier times kept humans connected to the world around them and to each other.This Blink to Katherine May’s Enchantment will share May’s journey to kindling that lost sense of enchantment anew, and will map out a path for you to start on this journey for yourself.

Chapter 1: Ground Yourself in Earth

Worn down by the challenges of working and parenting her way through a global pandemic, Katherine May began making a daily pilgrimage to a circle of stones in a field close to the English seaside village where she lived. She didn’t know what drew her to the stones – unlike the ancient cairns and stone circles created centuries before, this stone circle was a newly constructed public art initiative. And yet she kept returning to it. The rhythm of the daily walk began to feel like a ritual; the ritual began to accrue its own meanings and significance. What had once been a walk, she realized, was now a pilgrimage that, without being religious, still felt spiritually nourishing. At the same time she had been making her daily visit to the stone circle, she had also been struggling with a lack in her life. A lack of what? It was hard to articulate. The poet John Keats’s concept of negative capability seemed to gesture at what she was thinking about, though. Keats described negative capability as a mode of thought that allows us to accept – even sink into – mystery, uncertainty, and ineffability without trying to rationalize anything away. In other words, it is the ability to perceive and accept – even embrace – magic. The ability to be enchanted by the world, without trying to break the spell. May realized she had lost that capability. How could she reawaken it? The stones seemed like they might hold at least part of the answer to her question.Ultimately, on her quest to re-enchant her relationship with the world, May looked to the four elements of nature: earth, water, fire, and air. Let’s begin this Blink with the element with which May herself began this journey – with stone, soil, grass: the element of earth.The Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade describes a phenomenon he named  . Hierophany is a kind of magic trick whereby if you look at something attentively and worshipfully enough, the power of your gaze can transform it into an object of reverence – something sacred. It works for anything: a tree, a shoe, a loaf of bread. But we have fallen out of this practice. In ancient times, Eliade contends, humans turned this worshipful gaze on everything, and the entire landscape functioned as a hierophany. Now, we spend our time in what Eliade would term shallow terrain: office blocks, suburbs, shopping centers. But there are still parts of this Earth that are deep terrain – places like forests, where the landscape has functioned as a hierophanic site for centuries and is imbued, even now, with generations of reverence, memory, and meaning.May found that spending time in deep terrain allowed her to cultivate her own hierophanic capabilities. If you’d like to do the same, try this: carve out time in your day and head for deep terrain. For May, this was a forest. For you, it might be a lake, a hill, or a field. Then simply walk. As you walk, pay worshipful attention to what you see and sense. Notice the pattern of the branches against the sky, the sound of birds chirping. As you walk, try to move through layers of perception. What can you see if you really look? Beneath the layers of birdsong, what else can you hear? You are performing hierophany, casting your own spell over the landscape, and transforming it into something magical and sacred. May found other simple strategies for connecting to the Earth and grounding herself in its possibilities. For example, she grounded her body to the Earth by going barefoot. At first she did this only while meditating. Later, she went barefoot wherever she could and noticed how the feel of earth or floor beneath her feet became a kind of moving meditation. She also looked for pebbles and stones on her walk, and often carried one in her pocket – a simple reminder, whenever she put her hand in her pocket, to stay connected with the earth where she and the stone both came from.

Chapter 2: Embrace the Healing Flow of Water

There is no better reminder that the world is infinitely large and that everything within it is intimately connected than a trip to the ocean.Here is May’s advice: spend time at the ocean. Perhaps you can spend a little time there every day; perhaps you can spend a solid 12 hours there. During this time, observe the soft rhythms of the ocean, the gradual shifts in the landscape, and the dramatic transformations that occur almost imperceptibly over the course of a day. The movements of the tides are the magical rhythm of the universe. As you watch the tide come in and out, you are watching the rotation of the earth and the magnetic pull of the moon. The tide you see ebbing away or rushing in is a tide that connects you with the rest of the planet, and with the world that exists beyond the atmosphere of Earth.Perhaps it's unsurprising that water has long been imbued with mystical, spiritual properties. In medieval times, in May’s native England, certain wells were renowned for their properties of healing and renewal. Sick people would recover when they drank from or bathed in these waters. These days such wells in Britain are often forgotten – unobtrusive and unmarked, these places that used to crackle with magic are now overlooked. A link has been broken in the chain of generational understanding that once formed meaning and magic around these sacred places. When May stumbled across a once-renowned, now-abandoned healing well, she was intrigued but also confused – stripped of its context, the well offered no clues. How should she approach it? What should she do there? What could it offer her? But the puzzle of the well was also a key – in a landscape where the collective understanding of enchantment has been lost, you are the one who fills the well, so to speak.In the absence of a collective ritual, May established her own. Before she visited the well, she always baked bread, enjoying the feeling of working with her hands, allowing her mind to still as she paid attention to what was happening around her. Then, with a fresh loaf of crusty bread, she would walk to the well, sometimes alone and sometimes with a friend. She would always silently ask the well permission to visit. Then she would sit, meditate, reflect, and tear into the still-warm bread. Perhaps you can establish a similar ritual. It should be something you can do repeatedly, something that involves your hands and prompts you to quiet your mind, and it should be something connected, in a way, with nature. Whether it's the wide ocean or a serene pool, spending time in and near the water reminds us that the universe flows in ways both mysterious and magical.

Chapter 3: Step into the Beauty of Flame

Fire is destructive yet beautiful. Consider the way moths are attracted to flames, to sizzling light bulbs, to sources of heat that can singe their wings or even, should they get too close, destroy them. Fire is the darker side of enchantment – it reminds us of nature’s terrifying potency, and its capacity to both awe and harm. Every life has its fiery points – things burn, hopes and ambitions and relationships turn to ashes. Some of us try to live as though fire doesn’t exist, but this won’t keep us safe from its effects. A life that embraces the beauty and terror of fire is one that allows for the full spectrum of emotion and experience – a life that leaves a door open for enchantment. One night in 1833, along the east coast of the USA, anyone who looked outside into the pitch-dark night would have seen an incredible sight: a rain of stars falling from the sky. They shimmered with color, according to some witnesses, and crackled with sound, according to others. Some witnesses remember feeling the stars were so close they might have reached out and caught them in their hands. Most onlookers were terrified at first, but when it became clear they were not in imminent danger, they watched in wonder, suddenly recalled to the strange and magical machinations of the universe around them. Scientific papers were written about the starfall, which we now know to be the result of debris left in the wake of the comet Tempel-Tuttle as it passed by the Earth. Some religious congregations saw it as the end of days. More often, it was referenced in literature and in song; it became a chronological touchstone in the oral histories of slaves who had no means of producing written histories with meticulous dates; it features in paintings and plays and even on a historical quilt that now hangs in the Smithsonian. The starfall didn’t produce one concrete interpretation – it sparked a range of responses and revelations. Enchantment doesn’t arrive in a prepackaged form; how we respond to it is up to us, and this is part of its spell.Fire is an unruly force, certainly. But it is our behavior around fire that truly determines whether or not this element is safe to engage with. Fire, treated with respect, purifies and renews it sparks creativity and community. It may not always visit us in the form of a miraculous starfall, but fire brings with it its own kind of wonder.

Chapter 4: Tap into the Transfiguring Properties of Air

More than two hundred years ago, in the heart of Germany, an Englishman named J. Lud Jordan climbed to the top of the Brocken, the highest peak in the Harz Mountains. When he reached the summit, it was wreathed in mist and fog. As he stood to gather his breath, he looked down into the valley below and saw something incredible. A giant man, outlined in the mist, and glowing fuzzily at his edges, almost like an angel. What he had seen, in fact, was a phenomenon known as a Brocken specter. The misty conditions at the top of the peak can mean that sometimes the shadow of a climber can be thrown onto the mist, and reflected back to them at strange, disproportionate angles. Jordan, like so many other climbers, was enchanted by himself – and by the element of air.Air is a place of change and flux. It is the element that surprises us with sudden apparitions, that disperses thick clouds to reveal sunshine, that allows fog or breeze to suddenly rush in and change the atmosphere in an instant.If you feel your life is tracking, inevitably, in one fixed direction, remember how quickly things can change course in the air. For a long time, May felt that she had been sucked into a vortex of stress, burnout, and internet scrolling – a vortex that will feel familiar to many of us. She mourned her lack of connection with the local landscape and with the loss of local knowledge and tradition. She was trapped on a path she didn’t want to walk. But she didn’t know how to correct her course.Then she read about a Micronesian navigator named Mau Piailug. Mau was an expert in traditional wayfinding. He could navigate on sea or land solely using the clues offered by nature – the position of the stars, the direction of the breeze, even the movements of birds and fish. These skills had been passed down to him through oral tradition. But when Mau died in 2010, the oral tradition died with him. May contemplated the many ways in which local knowledge like Mau’s is lost – sometimes taken forcibly by colonizers, sometimes simply forgotten or let to lapse. She wondered if our diminished capacity to be enchanted by the land was connected to our lack of knowledge about it. So she reset her compass points. Instead of keeping up to date on Twitter’s latest, she threw herself into learning the names and properties of all the plants that grew in her local area. She researched the etymology of place names, learning how history and lore are folded through the names of streets, cities, and towns – names she had previously considered mundane. And she took up the practice of traditional beekeeping, learning from local apiarists how to keep, and tend to the needs of, her hive.Knowledge, we are often told, dispels magic and enchantment. But knowing that the angelic forms cast by a Brocken specter are, in fact, one of nature’s intricate optical illusions shouldn’t make them less enchanting – if anything, they become more awe-inspiring. And May found that the more knowledge and deep understanding she brought to her surroundings – the more she held the world in her informed, worshipful attention – the more magical it came to seem. For a long time, Katherine May felt that magic and wonder had seeped from her life. But simply turning her attention to the landscape around her was enough for her to change course. Like a breeze changing direction, she began to move away from an unfulfilling, disconnected life and toward one marked by enchantments, great and small.

Final Summary

When Katherine May wanted to reawaken her capacity for enchantment, she looked to the world around her. Taking lessons from the four elements – earth, water, fire, and air – she learned to create her own rituals, meaningfully engage with the landscape, and cast her own spell over the world.

About the Author

Katherine May is an English poet, writer, and podcaster. Her memoir Wintering was an international bestseller, and her hit podcast How We Live Now is ranked among the top 1% of podcasts globally.