Katherine May: Falling in Love With the World

Katherine joins me today to discuss her newest book, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. A much needed follow-up to her first book, Wintering, which provided so many with language that articulated the pain of the long, communal loneliness and dislocation resulting from the pandemic—even though it was written well in advance—Enchantment presses forward to provide readers with a guide to rediscovering the beauty in being alive. The adult world, Katherine notes, is a profoundly play-less place—as we age, we turn away from our innate sense of wonder and awe in favor of grounded materialism that leaves us tired, anxious, and lonely. In our conversation, she encourages listeners to lean into our natural curiosity, engaging with what feels interesting and luminous in our immediate environment in order to re-sensitize ourselves to the subtle magic of living. We talk about sitting with our fascination instead of rushing to process it and the unique value of small moments in a world that prizes big experiences. For those of us searching for a different way of relating to the world, Enchantment is the balm we have been looking for. 

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• The death of playfulness…17:17

• Longing and loneliness…29:57

• Everything and nothing, all at once…38:27

MORE FROM KATHERINE MAY:

Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

The Electricity of Every Living Thing: A Woman's Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home

Explore KATHERINE'S WEBSITE

Listen to her podcast, How We Live Now, on APPLE PODCASTS or SPOTIFY

Follow her on INSTAGRAM

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE: Well, I think I speak for everyone when I say that your books are such bombs, I just wanna live with you.

KATHERINE: You don't.

ELISE: I wanna live with the edited version of you.

KATHERINE: Yeah. That's the one, do you know what, I was thinking about this today because you know, I wrote a post that everyone's sharing about, it's a religious day, which is happening today and this significant spiritual moment that is. And then I went upstairs and realized my toilet was leaking and dealt with that. And then I went downstairs and did an interview about how to live a more spiritual life. And I just thought, that’s the sandwich. That is my existence, you know?

ELISE: I know it's true of all of us, right? Like life's there to catch you just when you're sort of captivated by your own luminosity. Yes. And then you're like, it's find yourself like honking at an old person at a stoplight.

KATHERINE: Looking for like the worst towels you own in the airing cupboard so that you can wipe up the bathroom floor.

ELISE: I wrote something recently about, I don't know if you've ever listened to Father Richard Roar?

KATHERINE: Yeah.

ELISE: There was a comment, it was in maybe a Krista Tippet interview and it was, I pray for my daily humiliation.

KATHERINE: I don't need to pay for it. It just comes.

ELISE: It just comes, same. But, you know, I don't think he has children. He doesn't have as many opportunities living in a hermitage for humiliation that you and I might normally experience. But I was like, yes, so many opportunities. But you have to stay grounded, right? That's the etymology of humility. This is what brings Katherine May leaking toilets grounds you in your existence, so you don't just float off.

KATHERINE: It's, I mean, you know, we're laughing, but actually I think that's what my new book's about in a funny kinda way. It's like, how do you how do you have those higher thoughts at the same time as life being exactly as life is and there's no escaping that. Like I can't imagine a life that would let me avoid ever having to deal with that. And, maybe I don't want to, maybe that's part of the mix.

ELISE: Yeah. And your book also felt to me like an anthem against reductive thinking or this idea that we can go and cherry pick, like we can curate our lives, our spiritual lives, our lives laced with moments of magic and enchantment and that we can live there. And it's somehow about a Venn diagram, right? Like pulling these poles together.

KATHERINE: Yeah, it's about living that full spectrum of life and not getting caught up in the fantasy that you can somehow shop front that so that everything looks like an Instagram feed. Because actually that would be a very flat experience, to be honest, even though a lot of it is pretty unpleasant and boring and irritating and like there's all these different like unwanted emotions that we have to wade through every day.

But that is the existence. That's the dance we enter into. You know, we have to find a way to unload the dishwasher twice a day and also engage with the luminous flow of the universe. Like both of those have to be true. You can't have one or the other.

ELISE: Yeah, but like you, and again, this is why I think you speak for everyone or go first in, in so many of these movements, we've lost, right? We've lost those moments of magic or enchantment, we've forgotten to find that around us and have been so grounded in this materialist, grindy world. I know you started working on this book before Wintering even came out. But then you talk a bit, at the beginning, about the grounding nature of the pandemic and then your search. Do you have a spiritual construct or is it nature?

KATHERINE: No. Do you know what, I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I think, in many ways, I'm specifically resistant to having a construct. Like I actually don't believe it's pin-downable. And I think as soon as we construct a big story around it, we lose the thread of it, and I mean for me, cause I'm a language person, I noticed that the most in language that as soon the language becomes fixed around any one experience, it loses its tingle of contact for me, and it becomes kind of dead. And I think the practice is to keep seeking that personal experience and that personal like hit of electricity. And to keep making language around it and to keep making practice around it.

And that for me is where the life of it is actually that, to know that it's impossible to express and that it's impossible for us to really understand because we can never look at it directly. Maybe I'm a Taoist most of all. I mean, I think it's closest to Taoism really that sense that the, you know, there's this unknowable force that that deliberately isn't knowable, like that's the point of it.

ELISE: Yeah. I mean, it's funny also as a writer, because I try to pin things down or explain things like you, and yet also there's an ineffable quality to the voice and the resonance of things that we both hear and experience or see that can't, as you said, be captured. And you think even about Jesus, Jesus didn’t write. This was a long oral tradition. This was something that you were supposed to hear and pass on. And I think so many of the, the richest Buddha, all of these, I don't know what you would call them, ascended masters. Like it was an oral experience. It was an experience, right? I can imagine.

KATHERINE: And like an improvised experience as well, like part of the oral tradition is that, I mean, it's a long time since I read the gospels, I have to say. But you get the sense of like, Jesus, reaching for a story to communicate a certain thing at a certain moment in response to a certain question or challenge, and fixing that down is not what we need to do. We need to keep finding that improvised response based on this exact vector that we find ourselves. And, and I realize that's frustrating because I'm never gonna be a writer that's gonna say, right, here's the answers, guys. Like, I've got it. I've worked it out. I've sat and thought about it for three years, like, here we are. You know? But that's an invitation for everybody to go in and dance their own dance with it. And I like, I'd hate to take that away from anyone by knowing it.

ELISE: No. And you can't. I think that's the whole idea. It's an internal experience that can't be taught or co-opted or experienced by anyone other than you or me. And like you, I mean, I loved your conversation about going to the well and, and rocks and your experience of nature finding enchantment and magic. Like that's where it starts. Cause that's one of the other problems with the way that religion, and again, I'm not a, a theologian at all and I didn’t grow up with religion, so I probably am getting this wrong. But there is this separation, this suppression of nature or this idea that and it's interesting cuz you hear people like Katherine Ho who wrote Saving Us. She's the head of the Nature Conservancy and she's an evangelical Christian, I believe. And one of her whole things is like, how do I get faith leaders to understand that the gospel was actually saying, no, you're stewards of the earth. This destruction of the environment isn't God's will or way. But that so much of the magic is there, right? Like that's where spirituality lives, I think.

KATHERINE: It’s evident, it’s apparent, but it takes our engagement and it takes our seeking and our acts of meaning making that are ever flowing onwards that never stop, but also I think it's time for us to flip our understanding of like, humans are sentient and the land is sentient, this thing that we walk on top of. That’s actually a very recent conception of the planet we live on, the air we breathe, and I think it's time for us to go back to a sense that information is encoded everywhere and that there's a conversation between us and the land. But there's not dominion, we are not shaping it. It's shaping us. It’s our job to respond to its needs and as you say, to to be stewards, to be good caretakers, but to, at the same time, respect the, the livingness of this place that we live in, that, you know, we're not superior within that taxonomy. We're like just part of it.

ELISE: In The Electricity of Every Living Thing, another one of your books, which I love, I mean you talk about your sense perception, the feeling, the electricity, right? Can you talk a little bit more about that and the way that the sense of enchantment or magic in nature maybe presents itself to you?

KATHERINE: Yeah, I think it's difficult to express in lots of ways. And I think for me it always begins with a sense of fascination. Like, what's caught my attention? What feels really interesting, what feels really luminous to me? What can I not look away from? Like, what is it that I want to kind of borrow deeply into and explore and know about and touch and like experience?That is electric to me. I talk about electricity a lot. And that's part of it. Like, it has a sense of aliveness of like being more than I can understand easily. Like in the same way that an animal is. Like I find the same experience in rocks and trees. It feels like it's present to me. Yeah, so it's that question of attraction and following those lines of attraction and just being with them, I think for a while. You know, being able to sit with that sense of fascination rather than trying to process it too much. Like rather than trying to say, oh, I know this about this thing, so now I'm gonna put it down and walk away, or, which is the thing I think we are often taught as we are growing up to say, oh this, this level of fascination is childlike and inappropriate, and it's time to move on from that because actually you need to turn your mind to more serious matters. There's nothing more serious or important than that, that need to engage, that need to, to worship honestly, and to feel like the ground beneath your feet is a sacred space.

ELISE: Hmm. Beautiful. I know I picture you and all of us to some extent as just like having your antenna up a little bit, maybe a little bit higher, a little bit more far reaching. And it was interesting too, when you talked about writing and dancing around that identification and then it was one of your professors, right? Who chastised you for your note taking? I'm the same way. Like I compulsively transcribe. It's soothing to me and it's how I process I think, or how I bring it into my body. And it was interesting because I think that these are muscles, these antenna that we have to use, we have to practice, right? And that's true of the engagement with the world or tuning into that, those frequencies. And I love that you recognized your talent for writing and then abandoned it and then recognized that to retune. Can you talk a little bit about that?

KATHERINE: Yeah, so I kind of, I always say like, I was born writing really like it. I think writing came to me before reading. It was always this thing that I wanted to do and I did it all through my childhood. And as I got a little older, I decided I wanted to be a poet. Like that was what I felt strongly called to do. But then there came this age, I think probably in my early mid-teens when I began to realize that that was like a slightly embarrassing thing to reach for, that it represented like an overreaching, I guess, and it was pretentious in the eyes of other people, but also that it just seemed unrealistic to anyone, you know?

And I remember going to a careers interview and, they asked me what I want to do and I said, I want to be a poet. And they were like, great. Have you thought of the prison service? I went to school near a very famous jail, so they were recruiting clearly. I would be an awful prison warden. Like, I hate noise. I hate stress. I don't deal with people very well. I cannot imagine, like a riot would break out on the first day. I was clearly not suited to it, but I abandoned it and there was some teasing, you know, from other students, et cetera, et cetera, and I decided to put writing to bed.

I decided that it was time for me to know better, but it just wouldn't leave me alone. Like it really, it kept being in the back of my head and I kept, thinking up stories and thinking up things I wanted to write and stringing groups of words together. And I would literally scold myself and be like, no we are not doing that anymore, Katherine. We're gonna be a serious adult and we're gonna have a proper job when we figure out some office that we can live in without wanting to go and hide. It only came back to me when I'd finished my teacher training. I'd done this kind of on-the-job training route that was really grueling and I sat in my final assessment with the examiner and afterwards he said, you've passed.

And he said, now what are you gonna learn next? And I was like, are you kidding me? I'm just gonna sleep for a year now. And he said, no, no, you've got in the habit of studying and the best teachers are also students and you need to carry on like living that life because you'll lose the ability to do it. And so I signed up for a creative writing class cause I just couldn't stop myself. And that there, yeah. Then it was fully back.

ELISE: And that was it. That was enough, were you a teacher?

KATHERINE: I was a teacher. Yeah. I taught for three years. Yeah. Not for very long. I couldn't hack it. It was too hard.I just was exhausted after three years. It was a lot.

ELISE: I wanna read to you a little bit, if you don't mind, from your book, it's so beautiful. You write: “Through all my brave rejection of the writing life, I had been making one basic assumption that writing was my path to reject. In that hour spent in my makeshift study, I learned many things that a childhood talent does not necessarily translate into an adult one, that your craft will die if you don't nurture it, and that your most profound thoughts seem shamefully thin when they're at risk of appearing on a page, above all, I learned what happens when you turn away from play, the most beautiful reaches of your attention degrade within you, leaving behind a residue of bitterness and frustration and playlessness. Your adult self is not nurtured, but strangled in deep play. That play that connects across months and years, that fosters its own arcane missions that delves into the minutiae of being is hard to find again.” Oh, Katherine. So beautiful. But this is it and so much of it is going back to nature for a minute. That severing that the death of playfulness, the death of wonder, the death of enchantment. What is it do you think that severs that? Why do we turn away?

KATHERINE: I mean, I think there's loads of things, but I think that the adult world, as we know it now, is a profoundly playless space. And, but I also think that we don’t carry on letting our sense of play develop, because I don't think play stays the same as we age and we need a more agile understanding of what play can be. Because play for me is definitely borrowing deep into words and ideas and thoughts like that is my playful space and I totally realize that does not look playful from the outside to other people. But it it is my state of flow and it's also my state of exploration and joy. And it's this thing that I yearn to do that, on one hand, takes up all of my attention in that moment, but which is also deeply restful and deeply restorative and sets me straight again to go out into the world.

KATHERINE: And I do think that, you know, when we abandon play, it's partly just because we carry on rethinking what play might be like. Yes, we're definitely ready to put aside those Barbie dolls. We're over those, but we don't have like a role model to show us that actually the next phase in playing might look like this and very few people carry on. I mean, I think a good example of people who do carry on playing a musicians actually, that they have this pathway that's offered to them to keep on making in that lovely, rich space. Um, but there should be many, many others that we can reach for and, you know, experiment with.

KATHERINE: Like, it might take us by surprise.

ELISE: That's so true. I also think etymology dictionaries are fun. I'm with you on that, and also joy. I mean, I wrote a newsletter this morning sort of outing myself as a spiritual person. And not that, that's not clear.

KATHERINE: Everyone was like, whoa, where did that come from? What?

ELISE: What are you talking about? <laughs> I know, I know, but it's funny how, one, how much shame I have about that because it doesn't seem very intellectual and serious and I'm certainly interested, it’s like I listen to all these interviews with physicists and I'm like, is anyone say that they have any sense of spirituality, even though science, I think is a spiritual language, and no, they're all like profound atheists, which which bums me out. But I also understand. I was, you know, talking about is this, how fun, how I think organized religion. Whomever has done a really bad job of selling a spiritual life, right? Yeah. You're like, that sounds terrible. I don't wanna go sit in a church. I don't want to listen to words. I don't understand and for me it's in that is a type of internal play, like going inside, finding interiority, being in conversation with the universe is fascinating. It's so fun.

KATHERINE: Yeah. And also gathering with other people to enter that space together, but in a way that doesn't come with judgment. Or that doesn't come with like a moral system that's so rigid that you can't thrive under it. I mean, I, you know, I love running my retreats where really I just get people in a room to sit together and, and breathe and, and be.

That is, for me, such a nourishing space, like with no goals, no kind of fixed outcomes. Inviting people to go off and explore. Inviting people to skip a group session and have a nap, or go for a walk, like to just retune into desire. And maybe our group spiritual experiences are not teaching us that, that can be really pleasurable as we're growing up. And that actually it can be this like deep source of nurture. Of course, it's not true of everyone because some people join churches that do that for them. But I certainly didn't find that as I was growing up.

ELISE: Yeah. No, but you're tapping into something that I think is so important, which is this longing for community. And I think some of it is community without even saying anything at all. And as you said, just being together and having an experience and breathing together without necessarily…

KATHERINE: Pressure.

ELISE: Yeah, pressure. I went to a friend was having a retreat and I did a little talk with her and she's a therapist and, but it was really interesting just to see this feel really this group of women who were gathering for a number of days and the whole concept was very simple. It was just a simple container and it was deeply moving. It's not that she was necessarily stoking that it was just emergent, because I think we long to be together and that's we only need that opportunity.

KATHERINE: I mean, after a few years of lockdowns, you know, I actually think we're struck all over again by the interconnection we feel when we're present with each other and maybe that's doing us some good, that we can really feel the hit of that when you are in a room with other people who are having emotions with you and that you can taste them, you know, they're present in the room. These do not feel like separate human beings. You become a community which is linked together, which has always been linked together incidentally, but we notice it. I love those exploratory spaces. I love the emotions that well up and I love the peace that descends on them.

ELISE: And you think about modern society and modern culture and then even just the extreme nature of lockdowns, right? Where we live in this patriarchal society where we are single family homes or you know, all contained in our space, like we've lost that collective village structure or that allo parenting model, right? You know, smaller neighborhoods, when I grew up, where kids roamed free, like we're getting more and more restricted. And certainly the lockdowns brought that to an extreme head. Rightly, there was wariness of everyone, but I think it forced I think it forced, hopefully it continues to stay, it’s probably gone. But, you know, you heard about all these hives. You heard about all these collectives being formed in response, which was so beautiful. We need that. We need structured. We need support.

KATHERINE: Absolutely we do. And it's the spontaneity of that that's really important. You know, not to enter into these like arrangements that are very organized and that have a purpose and that, you know, okay, so we're going to like a class today where you're gonna learn alongside your child and improve yourselves, and that's how we're gonna interact. But it's actually those everyday buffeting up against each other and witnessing people in different phases of life and giving small little doses of support rather than it having to be a great, big performance. I mean, I'm an only child and my son's an only child, and it really struck me forcibly in the pandemic what a problem that is for all of us because other children at least had their siblings to play with. And my son had to, had to play completely alone for months on end. And I mean, you know, obviously, like everything was just very quickly put in place and I get it, but I was desperate to be able to say to someone in government, like, please, can you make different rules for only children because this is developmental. They are doing stuff that they shouldn't have to do alone. It’s more than just them being bored, like this is how they learn and grow and they're doing it in total isolation and in fact they're not doing it. They can't do it because they need to be doing that. You know, crawling all over each other, things that children do. I mean, apparently, that's fun. You know, scratching each other, complaining about each other, but then not wanting to leave each other.

ELISE: How is he doing now?

KATHERINE: He's great. He did struggle. It was really, really hard, but he's, you know, he's actually bounced back really well, and in fact, I think in a funny kind of way, he's come back stronger because he did a load of catching up in that time. Like he had more time and space to catch up on his schoolwork and things like that, and now, a load of concepts dropped in place for him. So actually I think, you know, it's a very helpful time, but the social life has been the thing we've really needed to catch up on. And I hated watching him be so lonely. It was just vile.

ELISE: Yeah, but we talk, I mean we recognize, and this is certainly happening in the US I think it's happening in the UK as well. I mean, Dr. Sam, his whole focus is for years and years long before the pandemic was loneliness and this epidemic of loneliness. And I think he would, he would get older people to plant community gardens and find any mechanism for treating disease through communion. And I’ll put his name in the show notes when I find it. This is predating covid, these conversations about loneliness. And I think if anything, the pandemic was like, we're all lonely. We're all lonely. Even though so many of us are buffeted by a lot of social engagement. I think that true longing to be with people, there was certainly a spotlight on it.

KATHERINE: I still think kind of going back into the world, there’s that strong sense that we're still lonely when we're in each other's company actually too, which really needs addressing, that we are not connecting always, even when we're in each other's presence. And so you will be texting your friends all day, every day to the point of insanity. Like when you're like, make this all stop, but still feel lonely. There's some deeper stuff there about how we live on a basic level that isn't the same as how we socialize, you know, that those organized events don't cover it. We're seeking this profound connection with each other that is about shared living, and in this very individualistic society that isn't available to us. We're just doing everything alone and we’re endlessly reinventing the wheel. And that's painful to us, I think.

ELISE: Yeah. But that's also where I think that nature and that re-engagement with that type of worship to me is also a bomb. I had this experience during Covid, actually, now I’ll woo woo out here for a second because I know you love woo woo, Katherine, your favorite.

KATHERINE: I'm braced

ELISE: But I had this experience during a meditation. Where I was thinking about myself as a child like you. I mean, I spent a lot of time alone. I had an older brother, but we certainly spent time together, but I spent most of my days when I wasn't in town at school, outside turning over rocks, logs, looking for deer beds, like just in the woods, in nature, which was an incredible blessing. And I had this sensation during this meditation, this presence of like a, I would call it a mother, like a universal mother. And I was like, oh that's who was there. I had this like very moving, I think I started crying, but this feeling of, oh, I was never alone. I was never alone. And so I think nature, it was in company. And I think nature can do that for us, not only in the ant hills and the birds, and the communion of creatures, but in this, like there is, for me at least, I feel like there is a presence which is really accessible when I'm in nature of having some sort of company. You know, and something, some energy to commune with. I don't know if that's enough. It's probably not enough

KATHERINE: Why is it not enough? I mean, that's everything, isn't it? To me, that's everything that this sense there's this sentience and this very gentle, wise sentience that is present. When you tune into it, it's there. And I think like maybe we all conceptualize it slightly differently and picture it in our heads differently maybe, or, you know, make sense of it in a different way. But I don't understand how that's not there for some people, it seems observable to me, and yeah, you might, you know, call it one thing and I might call it another, or try and avoid calling it anything at all, which is like more my tendency. But when did we stop noticing it?

ELISE: Yeah. Well, and I think it goes to this mystical idea, right? That God, nature, whatever you wanna call it, is in everything, in all of us and in everything, it's distributed throughout the world. There's nothing that's not outside of the divine versus a concept or religious concept where there's a bearded God in heaven and you'll meet him someday when you die.

KATHERINE: And he might give you a good telling off incidentally, you know.

ELISE: He's gonna review your life and you're condemned or you're not. But this idea that I don't even know, source, whatever, but that it's elsewhere. It's somewhere else. It's left the scene and we're in some fallen state or fallen garden. It's like, no, no, no. It's everywhere. It's present everywhere. When we look.

KATHERINE: And actually we're like a particle of it, in fact, like we are part of that presence, it's really, it just doesn't seem to me to be in any way esoteric, that thought. It just seems like, there we go. That's what's here. I think you just have to have the time or make the time, make the space to tune into. There's a bit of the beginning of Electricity of Every Living Thing when I'm really talking about that. When I'd gone off and got lost in the woods and I walked for hours and I just couldn't find my way back out of the woods and there was this moment when I stopped and just had this sense of the forest as this complete system of life. Like I could suddenly hear this, this crackle. That felt to me like like I could hear the water being drawn up from the soil and I could hear the leaves dropping down, and I could just feel this like I was part of this body and it was. It was a remarkable moment, and I've never let go of that. And I think once you've heard it once, you can hear it again, this sense of being part of this huge system that's way bigger and way more ancient than you are and the humility of that, like the lovely, humbling that that entails. Because, you know, humility means literally to be part of the soil, to be of the soil and that is a grand feeling to chase, I think, to integrate with that.

ELISE: And to run that energy. It's funny, I'm tall like you, and my posture is not great, but sometimes when I like really stand up the energy is overwhelming to me. I don't know if you have that sensation, but sometimes it's like when you feel those goosebumps or that I feel so much electricity running through my body when I like stand up straight sometimes that I think I inherently crouch because I find it overwhelming.

KATHERINE: You really expand your chest and line everything up It's a lot of sensation, isn't it?

ELISE: Yeah.

KATHERINE: No, I get that. I really get that. But sometimes you can do it and it feels magnificent.

ELISE: Yeah. No, it's an amazing feeling. It's just so much, it's so much. And I think it's easier in a way to curl over and look at the ground or look at whatever material object is in your hands rather than opening up to energy of the universe to have those experiences, like you talked about.

KATHERINE: But you know, that sort of older meaning of the word awe, like we've, we've taken the edges off awe now. Like awe is like, oh, I've gone to a really pretty place and it was pretty or it was big, but awe was also was supposed to be like a slightly terrible feeling too. Like it was this feeling of you could be overcome. Like, here is this presence, like whether it's a mountain or a stream or you know, whatever that thing is, that it was so vast and powerful that at one time you thought it was indescribably beautiful, but at the same time integrated in that feeling with the sense that it could crush you like an ant and that you were nothing before it and that was like a very godlike experience. It was, you know, compared to what it would be to truly experience God, like as a blast of understanding. And we've stopped talking about the darker side of awe and the sense of potential it has to make us nothing and that's actually a really valuable part of your experience. We should feel like we're nothing sometimes because in fact we kinda are, we can maybe live with that all the time, but every now and then it, I think it helps to remember a little, unfortunately wrong people remember it. Like there are some people that really urgently need to think about it a bit harder and they're never the people that do it, that's the issue with it.

ELISE: I think, the etymology of humility, that grounding, you know what I think Richard Rohr was asking for being continually reminded not of like, oh, you're a peon and it's that, it's both, right? Like our lives we're in, we're hugely powerful and our lives have real meaning and impact in the world.And, like I laugh in your general direction, right? Like I think about growing up in Montana and going to Glacier and that's my place of awe when you're driving, going to the Sun Highway and you're just like, holy bananas. Like this landscape is ancient, massive, stunning. And I am a fleck, I'm a fly. My existence really doesn't matter here. It's that paradox, right? It's like a paradox is how you know it's true. It's this, you are the center of the universe and yes you are nothing in context to the universe.

KATHERINE: Yeah, everything and nothing all at once.

ELISE: Yeah.

KATHERINE: That's the thing that it takes a lifetime to kind of come to terms with, really that all of that is true all at once and that we can only glimpse the reality of that sideways and occasionally, like we sometimes get a little, a little look at it, but most of the time we don't fully understand what it actually is to live this life and to to be part of this. Like we we're not even capable of it. It's too big for us.

ELISE: Yeah. But you start through hyrophony, I love that you talked at length about this word, the way the divine reality reveals itself to us, transforming the objects through which it works. Like so much of enchantment is about small moments, right? Rocks that reveal themselves to be geos or a hidden well in the woods. Is that where you start?

KATHERINE: It's where I start an end, I think, yeah, I mean when I first started to approach the topic, my immediate thought was, oh good. I'm gonna have to some grand places. I'm gonna have to go and climb my mountain. I'm gonna have to go to the end of the world and thank goodness for me, that wasn't possible at that time, cause I couldn't travel anywhere. And so I, you know, lived with a sense of doom about it for about a week. And then I realized that that's completely the point of this. That it's actually about how all of us can access it and how, in fact, in a way those big experience almost mask the true meaning. Like, they're too big, everything rides on them and they expect us to bring something in this moment that we've planned for 18 months in advance and saved annual salary for, and like invested all this like grand meaning. And like, quite often we don't come away with anything really. We show the pictures to other people and say, look what I did. That's not the same as like getting what you need from the experience. And I instead started to think about how I could really learn to find those big emotions in the small and in a very restricted life. Which will come to us all sometimes and like many of us very often. What do we do? Do we say, oh, only rich mobile people can have awe? Or do we realize what ridiculous nonsense that is and start to go looking for it? And given that every one of us can step outside our door every night and see the moon and the planets and the stars, like it's actually always there. You don't have to travel very far. We can directly witness this extraordinary place, we have in a vast universe with our own bare eyes every single night.

ELISE: No, and it's so beautiful and it’s interesting you talked about, and maybe we're past this, we’re moving past this because we live in such an image filled world and it's everywhere. And maybe the novelty of capturing all of these moments on film is done now that you can Google anything and see anything, and it doesn't capture the awe. Right? I think that's the other thing that we're finally realizing is that our desire to capture the moment on page or on Instagram, it's just a shadow. It's nothing, right? It's a screensaver. It's an icon for the experience. But many of us have missed the experience because we've been focused on capturing, telling people, figuring out how we're gonna tell people about it or capturing it on camera.

KATHERINE: And like actually also performing our awe for other people. Like how can I make myself look awe-ed enough? And actually, I mean, awe is not a very communicative emotion in the moment, I think.

ELISE: Yeah, but we've been entranced by that. And I wonder if now that's dying. I mean, you see it, right? Like people are just not as interested in Instagram or there's an emptiness to it as much as it's a wonderful way of connecting with people. And that now it's like if we're not running it through our bodies, if we're not actually having an experience, then what's the point?

KATHERINE: It’s so funny cause this is exactly what I'm thinking about writing for my next book, is about this need for contact and this need for direct revelation rather than secondhand experience. And you are right. I think, I hope maybe not everybody, but a lot of us are beginning to realize that we do the opposite of make contact in much of our interaction online. That on one hand, like I think it's been incredible. I think it has linked together people who otherwise wouldn't find community. I think, wow, it's been an education, like I've learned so much about other perspectives that I never have ever encountered from my little backyard, you know, in the far corner of England. And that's miraculous and I never wanna be without that. But also in some ways, it pulls me further away from other people and it only lets me encounter a sanitized part of people's humanity that does the opposite of drawing me to them. It makes me feel very different to them and very separate and very ashamed that my failure relative to what I see on their screens and that is not great as. And I think for some people it's been incredibly harmful actually and I think for others it's been magical. But now that we have like massive fortunes being made from making fake reaction videos on Instagram.

ELISE: I know.

KATHERINE: It's where I reach my point of like complete refusal. I was reading an article the other day about these people who are making 50 grand a month by reacting to silly social media videos or memes that come up on the screen and tell them, guess their star sign or whatever. And the bigger reaction, the faker your reaction, the more likes you get, the more money you make. And, I just felt this uprising in myself against being any part of that culture that can skew our emotions so badly towards faking bigness rather than connecting and being truthful and making contact. And there's a turning point coming, isn't there?

ELISE: There is a turning point and I think as I look to you as a woman I love, but who is there, right? I

KATHERINE: I wagged my tail at you then. Did you see? You missed that? I gave you a little tail wag.

ELISE: But I feel like I know how long it takes to write books and bring them into the world. And so when your books come out, everyone has caught up. It’s the perfect cycle, I feel like for you, but you're speaking into a void that we all feel right? And I'm with you. I feel like we're at a tipping point. We're at a turning point of like, this doesn't hold, this won't hold anymore, you know, how do we all get off Instagram? How do we preserve the community, maintain the community, and get out of this and go back, return to what's in front of us.

KATHERINE: How do we keep the good bits? Yeah.

ELISE: Yeah. A thousand percent.

KATHERINE: I mean, I've just recorded the podcast season about this question of how do we come back together again? And it was this question that was obsessing me for so long because one of the things that social media has done to done to us is to make us feel desperately uncomfortable with views that are not our own. And, on one hand, like again, there's been some virtue in that. Like I think we've developed a lower tolerance for things like racist remarks or ableist remarks, you know, and I think we needed to do that very clearly as a society, however, we can't keep, I mean, I used the phrase social rubber at the beginning of enchantment. Like we've divided and divided and divided until we're just all these little pebbles sitting very step separately, and there has to be something that happens that shows us the way to gather back together again within. Genuinely diverse communities and not communities that we call diverse, but we're like asking those of different people to look the same, you know?

ELISE: No, totally.

KATHERINE: I mean, that's a revolution. It's absolutely huge. And we are feeling the enormity of that. And we should be, something big is happening and we could screw it up. If we don't acknowledge the enormity of what so many of us are trying to do and what we need to do clearly as like a whole human community, then things are going badly.

ELISE: Yeah.

KATHERINE: I'm such an optimist, like I'm an irrepressible optimist, and I feel excited by the possibility of learning to get back together again. And to, you know, reacquaint ourselves with common humanity.

ELISE: Yeah. And just to put a, a bow on that, I feel like the way that our culture has been so performative, so like, let me show you all of the things that I'm doing. Everyone needs a moment of privacy of integration, of again, running this stuff through our bodies and figuring out who we are, how we feel, how we wanna show up with each other first before we show up in the world. Instead of this rush, this rush reflects it. Reflexive rush of self-protection rather than actual integration. And I feel like we need this time to refigure.

KATHERINE: Trickle through.

ELISE: Like what you were saying, like we've broken ourselves apart in a really essential way, and now it's time to reconstitute ourselves and it's impossible to do it at the speed of social media. I think we're all years behind.

KATHERINE: You can't do it in hot takes and you can't do it in performative nonsense. That doesn't fully take it back into deep, deep, painful reflection. You know we can't do this on the surface.

ELISE: Yeah.

KATHERINE: That's a big change that we're being invited to make, and we don't have the skillset right now. Like we urgently need new leaders that will show us the skillset for this age that's gonna require so much of us. And such painful work, but also such beautiful work and such beautiful chances to connect and to reimagine ourselves as an entire population.

ELISE: Yes. And I think that it's exactly that, and I think our minds immediately go to pain and giving things up and relinquishing things that we think have value. I think the beautiful part is the joy of, oh, actually this is this interiority or this way of being feels so much better. It feels more beautiful.

ELISE: I really think that will be the felt experience of people. I think it is the felt experience of many people and then anyone who is still holding on when they let go, I think they'll be like, oh, this isn't actually painful. I have so much more to gain, there's like joy and resonance I think.

ELISE: I think we're waiting for this beating and the reality is..

KATHERINE: The beating is now, like we are having the beating. The beating is the resistance.

ELISE: Yeah.

KATHERINE: I had Lama Rado, who spoke so beautifully about this on my podcast and I really would urge everyone to listen, not cause it's my podcast, but just cause he's like a magic human being. I would urge everyone to listen to him on this because he talks about this apocalypse that we are actually living through that we don't wanna see as an apocalypse, but it's time for us to acknowledge that the apocalypse has come, but the apocalypse is what remakes us, and we need to be remade. There's a lot that needs to be remade.

ELISE: And isn't like the etymology or the meaning of apocalypse the showing of the revealing of what's not secret necessarily, but what's already there. It's more of a revelation. It's less of a zombie apocalypse.

KATHERINE: Yeah, the zombies have kinda ruined

ELISE: Yeah.

KATHERINE: I mean, this is way off topic, but isn't it really interesting that we're in an age that's obsessed with the zombie apocalypse, that, you know, small children are now into the zombie apocalypse, like in a way that I find terrifying and it's like, God, we'd much rather deal with that apocalypse, that imaginary apocalypse than the the one that is unfolding

ELISE: Yeah.

KATHERINE: That's interesting.

ELISE: Katherine, you're amazing. Thank you for everything you do.

KATHERINE: It's just such a privilege to come and chat to you and to, I love the way that like, two seconds in, you're like, right, I'm going really deep. What's God about? Come on then. I love that. More of that sort of thing.

ELISE: I know you'll give me an honest answer.

KATHERINE: Oh, hell yeah. I'm here for it. I don't wanna tell you what shoes I'm wearing. I wanna talk about this.

ELISE: Exactly. Well, I can't wait to see this book come out into the world and you're the best.

Oh to live inside Katherine May’s mind. She is such a beautiful thinker and person and much discussed in our interview, she is where we find ourselves but years ahead of us, leading the way. I think she would chafe at this, but to me she seems like a mystic in many ways, making seen what has been unseen, but felt for so many of us. She writes: “I realize as I stand there with my feet in the water, that I don’t need to ask the well for anything. Not for a blessing, or a wish, or for knowledge that I can’t find myself. I just need to make contact with a place that holds a residue of heterophony to feel the connection between myself and the many other lost souls who have come here not knowing quite what to say. Rather than to say any prayer, I needed to take care of this place, to make a gesture towards an invisible continuity of yearning. The mysteries that hold are not revelations or miracles, but the flow of unknowing across the centuries, the connection of wanting to understand. In this moment it seems to me that talking to God does not require faith or practice. It is a doing rather than a believing. An act of devotion reciprocated in the same way it is made. Mutely, through the hands and the feet, the myriad intentions of the body.” I’ll see you next week.