How to hold onto a sense of wonder
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Katherine May's new book examines the idea of awakening wonder in an "anxious age."Alexa Loy Dent -
May's new book.Riverhead Books -
May says she put a lot of work into how she thinks about prayer.Alexa Loy Dent
I didn't know what was under the train tracks, but that was the point. The track was elevated on top of a small bluff that ran parallel to West Yellowstone Highway, a road that ran right through my hometown of Idaho Falls in eastern Idaho. The highway made it possible for tourists to pretty much bypass our town altogether as they made their way on to their actual destinations like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Yellowstone Park.
We drove that road all the time, on our way to our dad's law firm or the arts center where my mom worked, or to pick up KFC to take to our grandparents' house on Sundays after church. And every time we did I would glue my face to the window of our blue GMC suburban, because if you weren't looking closely you'd miss it, an opening in the bluff under the train tracks. It was a half-moon shape with stones framing the edge. It seemed to have no discernable purpose, but every time I caught a glimpse I could see light coming through from the other side, light that was dancing off of a cross-stitch of thin trees with light green leaves, the delicate kind of green of something new in the world.
I can still see that opening in the bluffs so clearly in my mind. It felt like the door to a secret world where all kinds of wood nymphs and fairies lived and I imagined that if I could ever get inside I'd be wrapped in the most beautiful light and feel totally safe and understood.
When I was a teenager with a driver's license, I often thought about just driving over there and walking through the opening once and for all. But of course I didn't, because I knew the second I got up close to my fantasy it was all going to fall away.
Even in adulthood I was pretty good at conjuring a sense of enchantment. I could stare up at clouds and see magic in how they move. I could feel some sort of wisdom in old forests or something mystical in things others just called coincidences. But the pandemic knocked it out of me. We were stuck at home, the kids were crying, and they needed me to teach them how to read and how to do fractions, and then I was crying. And weeks stretched into months, stretched into years. And any previous ability I had to find enchantment in the everyday evaporated into the COVID-infected ether.
So when I picked up Katherine May's newest book and read this bit, it felt really familiar:
I have lost some fundamental part of my knowing, some elemental human feeling. Without it, the world feels like tap water left overnight, flat and chemical, devoid of life. I am like lightning seeking earth. Uneasy. I carry the prickle of potential energy in my limbs, ever deferred from the point of contact, the moment of release. Instead, it gathers in me, massing like a storm that never comes. I lack the language to even describe it, this vast unsettled sense that I'm slipping over the glassy surface of things, afraid of what lurks beneath. I need a better way to walk through this life. I want to be enchanted again.
It's like we were all locked away for two-plus years and when it was all over and we entered the world again we thought we could just pick up where we left off. But it didn't work that way. We can't go back again, we're different now. It's like we have to relearn certain things we took for granted.
May has written an entire book about this appropriately titled Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. And when I tell you that I dog-eared almost every page in this book, I'm telling God's honest truth. I didn't know how much I needed someone else to validate what I was going through. The sense that I had lost my curiosity, my imagination, my ability to make meaning.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Rachel Martin: Do you remember being enchanted as a child? Like a specific image or event that mesmerized you in that way?
Katherine May: Yes, and in fact the memories from childhood are actually very small things, but they felt so important to me. We didn't have iPads in those days so I used to spend a lot of time sitting in my back garden, smashing rocks open with a hammer.
Martin: A very enchanting activity.
May: It probably says a lot about my childhood. But you know, like every 10th or 20th stone would have a little geode of crystals inside it. And that was absolutely magical to me. I could uncover this tiny cave that was millions of years old and which nobody had ever seen before. There were loads of small things like that and I guess there's that time when everything feels heightened and everything feels very possible. And I think we almost deliberately shut that down as we get older.
Martin: You did not grow up in a religious household, is that right?
May: No, not at all. In fact, probably the opposite of a religious household. A household that felt very resistant to the idea of organized religion. And which equally thought that people with more vague spiritual beliefs were a little bit cringeworthy. So I do worry what my family thinks of me these days. But I did go to a church school. It's really common in the U.K. to go to church schools. And I always actually loved the religious bits of my church schools without believing in it.
Martin: The notion of God is complicated, right? But for many of us it's the word, the term, the idea that we use to connote something bigger. What does that mean to you?
May: Oh, I'd love to be able to answer that question. If only. This huge word, this huge three letter word, God, which I've never felt a connection with in any definition that I've been given. And yet as I've gone through life, I've also felt like there is something there that I can't define and that nobody else's definition does it for me, and I begin to think that it's the questing after that, that's the point of this actually. Rather than knowing, rather than the certainty and the solidification of this idea, the thing that is most enlightening to me is that constant search for connection with this ineffable thing. I wouldn't even call it a being, it's like a force that I sense sometimes.
Martin: Do you pray?
May: Yeah, I do, and I always have actually. It's something I learned to do when I was at school and I did it by rote then, but I've never stopped. And for the longest time I haven't known who I'm talking to.
Martin: I went to a religious school growing up too, and prayer was kind of the deal. Like you learned how to do it. There were like very specific things that you were supposed to say, or in my tradition, it was like a Presbyterian church school, you just freeform, you know, you're just like, "Dear God, this is what is on my mind."
May: Like, "I'm gonna have a nice little chat with you."
Martin: Yeah. As an adult I haven't figured out that language. I will admit it feels silly to me. Like I can't get over my own self-consciousness about it. Have you faced some of that too?
May: Oh my goodness, so much of that. It was something I decided to work on about a decade ago, actually. I realized I had this urge in me to pray, and yet I felt silly about every single instance of trying to do it.
I'd learned all these formulas for saying a group of words together and it didn't make any sense to me at all. Also, I was really troubled by how I'd been taught to pray, which was to ask for stuff in lots of ways. And I began to think of it as entering a state of prayerfulness rather than of praying. It was an act of communion and an act of trying to share what was in my mind and my heart in as honest and direct a way as I could. Because to me, what this greater being could do was know me in a way that no one else could know me.
Martin: Can you tell me about the well? Because that anecdote feels prayerful in a way.
May: So I'm lucky enough to live near Canterbury, which is an ancient site of pilgrimage and it's part of a far greater pilgrim's way that stretches all the way across Europe. A friend of mine told me that she had found this pilgrims well that she'd been visiting, and she took me to see it and I didn't really know what to expect. It's actually quite forgotten, that well, it's probably a thousand years old and it's hidden behind a giant overgrown rosebush. We crawled through the bush and I lost my coat in the process and then we came to this beautiful stone surrounding with a little pool at the bottom and a well was springing up into that pool. So every now and then you'd see bubbles coming up into this beautiful still, pool of water. And then there were several steps down to that pool.
That was such, I don't know, a magical moment for me. Because the thing with those steps was that you could only go down there alone. And as you went down the steps, You felt your sense of intention changing. Like our ancestors have worked out how to create this perfect little environment for reflection, and literal reflection. Because you get down there and you see your face reflected in the pool as well as all of nature around you as well. And there's something about the quality of that place that you knew that other people had come down there in the same frame of mind as you had, but over centuries.
Martin: What was especially profound for me in reading that part is the responsibility you have, that the individual has to make the meaning, right? Like the well won't do it for you. You write, "Once you're there, you're on your own. It offers no clues for what to do, no liturgy or ceremony. At the bottom of those steps you must confront your own yearning to make meaning. The water reflects only your troubled face. You are the one who fills the well."
That felt a little sad to me. I mean, empowering, yes, great, I get to create my own meaning. But, really?
May: Dammit, I just wanted it to tell me what to do.
Martin: Yes! Yes, Katherine. Sometimes you do want the well to tell you or to make all that is, you know, enigmatic, mysterious, complicated, difficult, clear in its reflection.
May: Ah, but Rachel, you know you don't like that already.
Martin: I know, it's true.
May: All of your contact with religion so far has told you that actually you hate that bit. You hate being told what meaning to make.
Martin: It's true.
May: That's the change that I had to undergo, and that I do think loads of us would benefit from undergoing, is this dropping of wanting to be told the answers because they're just not there. There are no answers. And simple answers quickly turn into horrible generalized strictures on our lives as soon as we start taking them in. And the learning for us is to sit with mystery. And to be able to get comfortable with not knowing and not understanding and feeling a little lost quite often, and going out and looking for spontaneous truths because actually there's very few universe ones.
Martin: Can you tell me about the moon shadow?
May: Yeah, so I dunno about everybody else, but I didn't know that there is a regular schedule of meteor storms happening above our heads all through the year and they are totally predictable and most of us will never go outside and watch them. And so I went with my family to a dark skies zone in the U.K. where I was most likely to see a certain meteor storm.
Martin: These are designed areas where you can't have artificial light.
May: That's right. They're normally in national parks, for example. And I thought I had a really good chance of seeing these meteors. But what I found instead was a supermoon. And the supermoon was so bright that it blocked out all other points of light in the sky. But what it showed me instead was my own moon shadow. I'm not sure I realized they were real, and I was so enchanted by this incredibly fragile apparition of myself being cast by the moon. Like a shadow within a shadow. A shadow onto night.
And it made me realize, I guess, exactly what I've been saying, which is we rarely get the answers we are looking for. We often get completely different answers about a completely different thing. Seeing my own moon shadow, it was magical to me, completely magical. And to play with my own shadow just like a child might do, I just had no idea it was out there waiting for me.
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Transcript
ERIC DEGGANS, HOST:
And I'm going to hand things over to NPR's Rachel Martin for another conversation from her series Enlighten Me.
RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: I didn't know what was under the train tracks, but that was the point. The track was elevated on top of a small bluff that ran parallel to West Yellowstone Highway, a road that ran right through my hometown, the one that made it possible for tourists to pretty much bypass Idaho Falls altogether as they made their way on to actual destinations - Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Yellowstone Park.
My family drove that road all the time on our way to our dad's law firm or the arts center where my mom worked or to pick up KFC to take to our grandparents' house on Sundays after church. And every time we did, I would glue my face to the window of our blue GMC Suburban because if you weren't looking closely, you were going to miss it - an opening in the bluff under the train tracks, like a half-moon shape with stones framing the edge. It seemed to have no discernible purpose, but every time I caught a glimpse, I could see light coming through from the other side, light that was dancing off of a cross-stitch of thin trees with light green leaves, the delicate kind of green of something new in the world. I can still see it so clearly in my mind. It felt like the door to a secret world where all kinds of wood nymphs and good fairies lived. And I imagined that if I could ever get inside, I was going to be wrapped in the most beautiful light and feel totally safe and understood.
When I was a teenager with a driver's license, I often thought about just driving over there and walking through the opening once and for all. But, of course, I didn't because I knew the second I got up close to my fantasy, it was all going to fall away. Even in adulthood, I was pretty good at conjuring a sense of enchantment. I could stare up at the clouds and see magic in how they move. I could feel some sort of wisdom in old forests or something mystical in things others just called coincidences.
But the pandemic knocked it out of me. We were all locked down, stuck at home. And the kids were crying, and they needed me to teach them how to read and how to do fractions. And then I was crying, too, when weeks stretched into months stretched into years. And any previous ability I had to find enchantment in the everyday evaporated into the COVID-infected ether. So when I picked up Katherine May's newest book and read this bit, it felt really familiar.
KATHERINE MAY: (Reading) I've lost some fundamental part of my knowing, some elemental human feeling. Without it, the world feels like tap water left overnight, flat and chemical, devoid of life. I'm like lightning seeking earth. Uneasy, I carry the prickle of potential energy in my limbs, ever deferred from the point of contact, the moment of release. Instead, it gathers in me, massing like a storm that never comes. I lack the language to even describe it - this vast, unsettled sense that I'm slipping over the glassy surface of things, afraid of what lurks beneath. I need a better way to walk through this life. I want to be enchanted again.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: It's like we were all locked away for two-plus years, and when it was all over, we entered the world again, and we thought we could just sort of pick up where we left off. But it didn't work that way. We can't go back again. We're different now. It's like we have to relearn certain things we took for granted.
Katherine May's newest book is all about this. It's appropriately titled "Enchantment: Awakening Wonder In An Anxious Age." And when I tell you that I dog-eared almost every page in this book, I am telling God's honest truth. I didn't know how much I needed someone else to validate what I was going through, the sense that I had lost my curiosity, my imagination, my ability to make meaning.
Do you remember being enchanted as a child - like, a specific image, event, conversation that mesmerized you in that way?
MAY: Yes. And, in fact, the memories from childhood are actually very small things. But they felt so important to me. So I used to spend a lot of time sitting in my back garden, smashing rocks open with a hammer. And we didn't have iPads in those days. Like, life was hard.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: Very enchanting activity.
MAY: Yeah. I mean, yeah, it probably says a lot about my childhood. But, you know, like, every, I don't know, 10th or 20th stone would have, like, a little geode of crystals inside it.
MARTIN: Ah.
MAY: And that was absolutely magical to me.
MARTIN: Yeah.
MAY: I could uncover this little tiny cave that was millions of years old and which nobody had ever seen before. And there were loads of small things like that. And I guess there's that time when everything feels heightened and everything feels very possible. And I think we almost deliberately shut that down as we get older.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: You did not grow up in a religious household. Is that right?
MAY: No, not at all. And, in fact, probably the opposite of a religious household, if that's possible - like, a household that felt very resistant to the idea of organized religion and which equally thought that people with more vague spiritual beliefs were a little bit cringeworthy. So I do worry what my family thinks of me these days. But I did go to church schools. Like, it's really common in the U.K. to go to church schools. And I always actually loved the religious bits of my church schools without believing in it.
MARTIN: The notion of God is complicated, right? But for many of us, it's the word, the term, the idea that we use to connote something bigger. What does that mean to you?
MAY: Oh, I'd love to be able to answer that question. If only - (laughter). This huge word, this huge three-letter word - God - which I've never felt a connection with in any definition that I've been given. And yet, as I've gone through life, I've also felt like there is something there that I can't define and that nobody else's definition does it for me. And I begin to think that it's the questing after that that's the point of this, actually. Like, rather than the knowing, rather than the certainty and the solidification of this idea, the thing that is most enlightening to me is that constant search for connection with this ineffable thing. For me, I wouldn't even say being. It's like a force that I sense sometimes.
MARTIN: Yeah. Do you pray?
MAY: Yeah. I do. And I always have, actually. It's something I learnt to do when I was at school. And I did it by rote then, but I've never stopped.
MARTIN: Really.
MAY: And I - for the longest time, I haven't known who I'm talking to...
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: (Inaudible) question. Like, I went to, you know, a religious school growing up, too, and prayer was kind of the deal. Like, you learned how to do it. There were, like, very specific things that you were supposed to say. Or, you know, in our tradition - it was, like, a Presbyterian church school - you just freeform, you know? You just - dear God, this is what's on my mind...
MAY: Good to have a nice little chat with you.
MARTIN: ...Super cas (ph). Yeah. Yeah. As an adult, I haven't figured out that language. I will admit that it feels, like, silly to me. Like, I can't get over my own self-consciousness about it.
MAY: Yeah.
MARTIN: Yeah. You have faced some of that, too?
MAY: Oh, my goodness. So much of that. It was something I decided to kind of work on about a decade ago, actually, that I realized I had this urge in me to pray. And yet I felt silly about every single instance of trying to do it. You know, like, I'd learnt all these formulas for saying a group of words together, and it didn't make any sense to me at all. And I also - I was really troubled by how I'd been taught to pray, which was kind of to ask for stuff in lots of ways.
MARTIN: Right.
MAY: And I began to think of it as entering a state of prayerfulness rather than of praying. It was an act of communion and an act of kind of trying to share what was in my mind and my heart in as honest and direct a way as I could because to me, what this greater being could do was know me in a way that no one else could know me.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: Can you tell me about the well? Because that anecdote feels prayerful in a way.
MAY: So I'm lucky enough to live near Canterbury, which is an ancient site of pilgrimage, and it's part of a far greater pilgrim's way that stretches all the way across Europe. A friend of mine told me that she had found this well - this pilgrim's well that she'd been visiting, and she took me to see it. And I didn't really know what to expect, but it's actually quite a forgotten little well. It's - you know, it's a thousand years old probably, and it's hidden behind a giant, overgrown rosebush. And so we crawled through the bush - I lost my coat in the process - and came to this beautiful stone surrounding with a little pool at the bottom, and a well was springing up into that pool. So every now and then, you'd see bubbles coming up into this beautiful still pool of water. And then there were several steps down to that pool.
And that was such a - I don't know - a magical moment for me because the thing with those little set of steps was that you could only go down there alone. And as you went down the steps, you felt your sense of intention changing, like our ancestors had worked out how to create this perfect little environment for reflection - and literal reflection because you get down there, and you see your face reflected in the pool as well as all of nature around you as well. And there's something about the quality of that place that you knew that other people had come down there in the same frame of mind as you had, but over centuries. And, yeah, it's an absolutely beautiful, magical place. And I hesitate to tell you all about it in case you want to go there, too (laughter).
MARTIN: You don't have to give me the GPS coordinates (laughter).
MAY: Oh, all right then. Maybe just for you.
MARTIN: But what was especially profound for me in reading that part is the responsibility that you have, that the individual has, to make the meaning, right? Like, the well won't do it for you. I'm reading now - this is from the section of the book about this. (Reading) Once you're there, you're on your own. It offers no clues for what to do, no liturgy or ceremony. At the bottom of those steps, you must confront your own yearning to make meaning. The water reflects only your troubled face. You are the one who fills the well.
And that felt, like, a little sad to me. I mean, empowering, yes, great. I get to create my own meaning, but, like, really? I have to do it?
MAY: Damn it. I just want it to tell me what to do (laughter).
MARTIN: Yes, Katherine. Yes. Sometimes you do want the well to tell you or to make all that is, you know, enigmatic, mysterious, complicated, difficult, clear in its reflection. But that's the whole point - right? - is it's sort of...
MAY: But, Rachel, you know you don't like that already, right (laughter)?
MARTIN: I know. It's true.
MAY: All of your contact with religion so far has told you that actually you hate that bit. You hate being told what meanings to make.
MARTIN: It's true. It's true.
MAY: Yeah.
MARTIN: Yeah.
MAY: Yeah. No, it's...
MARTIN: But that is...
MAY: And that's the change that I had to undergo and that I do think loads of us would benefit from undergoing is this dropping of wanting to be told the answers because they're just not there. There are no answers. And simple answers quickly turn into horrible, generalized strictures on our lives as soon as we start taking them in. And the learning for us is to sit with mystery and to be able to get comfortable with not knowing and not understanding and feeling a bit lost quite often and going out and looking for spontaneous truths because actually there's very few universal ones.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: Before I let you go, can you tell me about the moon shadow?
MAY: Ah, yes.
MARTIN: I love this story.
MAY: Yeah. So I didn't realize that there is a regular schedule of meteor storms happening above our heads all through the year. And so I went with my family to a dark skies zone in the U.K. where I was most likely to see a certain meteor storm.
MARTIN: These are designated areas where you can't have artificial light.
MAY: Yes, that's right. I thought I had a really good chance of seeing these meteors. And what I found instead was a supermoon. And the supermoon was so bright that it blocked out all other points of light in the sky.
(LAUGHTER)
MAY: But what it showed me instead was my own moon shadow. I'm not sure I really realized that they were real. And I was so enchanted by this incredibly fragile apparition of myself being cast by the moon, like a shadow within a shadow. It was a shadow onto night, you know? And it made me realize, I guess, you know, exactly what I've just been saying, which is that we rarely get the answers we're looking for. We often get a completely different answer about a completely different thing. And seeing my own moon shadow was magical to me - completely magical. And to play in that - you know, to play with my own shadow, just like a child might do. And I - yeah, I had no idea it was out there waiting for me.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: The book is called "Enchantment: Awakening Wonder In An Anxious Age." It's written by Katherine May. Katherine, what a pleasure to talk with you about these things. Thank you so much.
MAY: Thank you. That was so lovely.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MOONSHADOW")
CAT STEVENS: (Singing) Yes, I'm being followed by a moonshadow, moonshadow, moonshadow. Leaping and hopping...
DEGGANS: You can hear more conversations from Rachel Martin's Enlighten Me series right here, same time next week.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MOONSHADOW")
STEVENS: (Singing) And if I ever lose my hands, lose my plow, lose my land, oh, if I ever lose my hands... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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