Enchantment Quotes

“Every single thing I must do – any hint of a demand – grinds against me. I resent it all. I want to be left, quietly, alone. I don’t know what I do in that time should I ever achieve that perfect aloneness. I like to think I would read, but in truth I would probably sleep. I don’t have the attention for reading. I don’t have the attention for anything, really. My brain feels entirely separate from me. It is empty, but it also cannot take any more in. It seems that it’s a useless organ, endlessly refusing to notice what I want it to notice. It will not engage. It just glances off everything, like a pale beam.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“Danger, when it is always imminent, does harm. It doesn't need to actually arrive. You exhaust yourself in the act of forever looking over your shoulder. Your body readies itself to fight and never quite discharges that chemical cocktail. You channel it instead into anger and self-pity and anxiety and hopelessness. You divert it into work. But really what you do, with every fibre of your being, is watch. You are incessantly, exhaustingly alert. You don't dare ever let up, just in case the danger takes advantage of your inattention. I've forgotten what it feels like to have space in my brain for anything other than watching. For a long time I kept working teaching, pitching articles, writing editorial reports and for a while, that felt like a life raft. But then, incrementally, it became impossible. I was aware of a fog descending, a seizing of the gears, but it seemed diffuse until now.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“But seeking is a kind of work. I don’t mean heading off on wild road trips just to see the stars that are shining above your own roof. I mean committing to a lifetime of engagement: to noticing the world around you, to actively looking for small distillations of beauty, to making time to contemplate and reflect. To learning the names of the plants and places that surround you, or training your mind in the rich pathways of the metaphorical. To finding a way to express your interconnectedness with the rest of humanity. To putting your feet on the ground, every now and then, and feeling the tingle of life that the earth offers in return. It’s all there, waiting for our attention. Take off your shoes, because you are always on holy ground.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“I don’t want to sit like a brooding hen on the nest of my past achievements. I want to keep on going deep into the uncertain act of making, to see the unknown world stretch out before me and to devote myself to exploring it.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“I increasingly feel that a part of me is missing, the part that is able to sit with the seismic changes that come, to sense them and experience them and integrate them, rather than to merely administrate them. As I grow older this begins to feel like a desperate lack. There has been a yearning in me that I'm only just beginning to understand, a craving for transcendent experience, for depth, for meaning-making.”
― katherine may, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“I always thought that my future self would have ranks of books like my professor, all of them read and understood, an achievement in the past tense that proved I had become something. I now see that this was not what she showed me. She offered me instead the act of knowing, rather than the static fact of the known, a lifetime of enquiry. I don't want to sit like a brooding hen on the nest of my past achievements. I want to keep on going deep into the uncertain act of making, to see the unknown world stretch out before me and to devote myself to exploring it.

So I begin again, just as I have before. I have learned to be grateful for these losses, painful and disorienting as they are. They make me small again. The next world is so tantalising, lying across a million unread pages, and in which I am nothing, nobody, new.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“There has been a yearning in me that I'm only just beginning to understand, a craving for transcendent experience, for depth, for meaning-making. It's not just that the world needs to change - I need to change, too. I need to soften, to let go of the tight empirical boundaries, to find a greater fluidity in my being.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“It is an incremental sickening that builds from exhaustion upon exhaustion, overwhelm upon overwhelm.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“That’s because we misunderstand play itself, casting it as exuberant, silly, a frippery that signals to us that our children are still young enough to have not yet turned their minds to more weighty endeavours. But play is serious. Play is absolute. Play is the complete absorption in something that doesn’t matter to the external world, but which matters completely to you. It’s an immersion in your own interests that becomes a feeling in itself, a potent emotion. Play is a disappearance into a space of our choosing, invisible to those outside the game. It is the pursuit of pure flow, a sandbox mind in which we can test new thoughts, new selves. It’s a form of symbolic living, a way to transpose one reality onto another and mine it for meaning. Play is a form of enchantment.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“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 am 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.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, really. It’s nothing, but it’s also all-encompassing. I feel strangely empty, devoid of thought and energy. I am not sure where my days go, but they go. Every single thing I must do—any hint of a demand—grinds against me. I resent it all. I want to be left, quietly, alone. I don’t know what I’d do in that time should I ever achieve that perfect aloneness. I like to think I would read, but in truth I would probably sleep. I don’t have the attention for reading. I don’t have the attention for anything, really. My brain feels entirely separate from me. It is empty, but it also cannot take any more in. It seems that it’s a useless organ, endlessly refusing to notice what I want it to notice. It will not engage. It just glances off everything, a pale beam.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“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 am 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.
Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory. It relies on small doses of awe, almost homeopathic: those quiet traces of fascination that are found only when we look for them. It is the sense that we are joined together in one continuous thread of existence with the elements constituting this earth, and that there is a potency trapped in this interconnection, a tingle on the border of our perception. It is the forgotten seam of our geology, the elusive particle that binds our unstable matter: the ability to sense magic in the everyday, to channel it through our minds and bodies, to be sustained by it.
Without it, I feel I am lacking some essential nutrient, some vitamin found only when you go digging in your own soil.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“Lately I wake in the night and a few panicked seconds pass in which I can't locate myself. I could tell you my name, certainly, but not which version of me I'm dealing with... Mostly I am nobody when I wake up, just a consciousness in the darkness trying to piece it all together. It is a strange, free-floating moment, an anchoring of the self. It is an interlude, like held breath. Eventually it releases, the lungs fill, the world floods in. A reassuring upload of facts. A reboot. I am back.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“I have gone looking for one thing and found another, not something rare and celestial and beyond my control, but something that was always within my power to find. The act of seeking attuned my senses and primed my mind to make associations. I was open to magic, and I found some, although not the magic I was looking for.

That’s what you find over and over again when you go looking: something else. An insight that surprises you. A connection that you would never have made. A new perspective.

More often than not, I find that I already hold all the ideas from which my enchantment is made. The deliberate pursuit of attention, ritual, or reflection does not mystically draw in anything external to me. Instead, it creates experiences that rearrange what I know to find the insights I need today. This is how symbolic thought works. It offers you a repository of understanding that can be triggered by the everyday, and which comes in a format that goes straight to the bloodstream.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“Danger, when it is always imminent, does harm. It doesn’t need to actually arrive. You exhaust yourself in the act of forever looking over your shoulder. Your body readies itself to fight and never quite discharges that chemical cocktail. You channel it instead into anger and self-pity and anxiety and hopelessness. You divert it into work. But really what you do, with every fibre of your being, is watch. You are incessantly, exhaustingly alert. You don’t dare ever let up, just in case the danger takes advantage of your inattention. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to have space in my brain for anything other than watching.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory. It relies on small doses of awe, almost homeopathic: those quiet traces of fascination that are found only when we look for them. It is the sense that we are joined together in one continuous thread of existence with the elements constituting this earth, and that there is a potency trapped in this interconnection, a tingle on the border of our perception.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“We must resist the tendency of our minds to tell us that we have already assimilated that experience once and for all, a fixed idea that we can box up and stand upon to reach the next important thing. We have to find the humility to be open to experience every single day and to allow ourselves to learn something.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“One of my favourite meditations is to drop through layers of sound. You start by asking yourself what you can hear, then absorbing that fully for a while. The background hum of the everyday opens up and separates, and becomes composed of many different actions, many different lives all surging around you as you forgetfully go about your business, thinking you’re all alone. But when you have heard all those sounds, you listen for what’s beneath them, and you find those quieter noises at the edge of perception, or the ones that are so routine to your ears that your brain doesn’t bother to notice them. And then you go lower still, bracketing those surface sounds and the ones beneath them and asking what else is there. It’s like peeling space, stripping off layers until you find, lurking beneath it all, a kind of silence you can be in. This quiet is there all the time, but it takes effort to notice it. Some people even say they can hear the sound of creation behind it. I haven’t found that yet, but there’s no harm in wondering if it will ever come into my hearing.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“Burnout comes when you spend too long ignoring your own needs. It is an incremental sickening that builds from exhaustion upon exhaustion, overwhelm upon overwhelm. For me, the years trying to conceal my sensory distress and social dislocation in everyday life meant that I bounced in and out of burnout. It came in a different form every time. A sense of exhaustion so intense that I could barely stand; a collapse into muteness; a spiralling into all-consuming anxiety.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“I think I'm beginning to understand that the quest is the point. Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things; the sublime is not hiding in distant landscapes. The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It is transformed by our deliberate attention. It becomes valuable when we value it. It becomes meaningful when we invest it with meaning. The magic is of our own conjuring. Hierophany--that revelation of the sacred--is something that we bring to everyday things, rather than something that is given to us. That quality of experience that reveals to us the workings of the world, that comforts and fascinates us, that ushers us towards a greater understanding of the business of being human: it is not in itself rare. What is rare is our will to pursue it. If we wait passively to become enchanted, we could wait a long time.

But seeking is a kind of work. I don't mean heading off on wild road trips just to see the stars that are shining above your own roof. I mean committing to a lifetime of engagement: to noticing the world around you, to actively looking for small distillations of beauty, to making time to contemplate and reflect. To learning the names of the plants and places that surround you, or training your mind in the rich pathways of the metaphorical. To finding a way to express your interconnectedness with the rest of humanity. To putting your feet on the ground, every now and then, and feeling the tingle of life that the earth offers in return. It's all there, waiting for our attention. Take off your shoes, because you are always on holy ground.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“Writing, for me, is a way of making the airy matter of thought feel real. I can open up a notebook and solidify my feelings, which otherwise seem to float around my head, ill-defined, mutable. It is a necessary act of anchoring. I am not remotely sorry that I attempted to tether myself to the unknown language of my new degree by writing it all down, and I have rarely been sorry since. The only thing that troubles me in general is finding the thoughts I've so carefully stored amid all those reams of paper. I also fear that the ceiling will one day fall through under the weight of all the notebooks stored in the attic.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“Like Jean, I always like to put my hand to stone, except that I am more of a collector than a maker. Wherever I go, pebbles seem to find their way into my pockets and bags. When autumn comes, I discover the long-forgotten relics of last year's walks in my coats, each one of them a memento of a place, a time, a thought process. They scatter every surface in my house, too, sometimes requiring a grand clear out, when I gather them all up and tip them into the garden. Still, they find their way back in. I could almost believe that they reproduce.

I can think of no greater pleasure than a stone in the hand, the right one of just the right size. Stones have a pure kind of weight to them, like small concentrations of gravity. They seem to always crave contact with the earth, pulling down towards the soil that matches their serene chill. I reach for one now as I write this, and measure it against my palm. There is a definite coupling between the two of us, a communication of density, a heat exchange. For a moment, I am anchored again.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“Meanwhile, at the edge of consciousness, we sense a kind of absence. It is not easy to articulate, but it carries its own dark middle-of-the-night fear, its own harrowing. It's the sense that we have become disconnected from meaning in a way that we don't even know how to perceive. We sense it when we worry that we cannot stem the flow of our materialism. We sense it when the pull of our smartphones feels a lot like an addiction. We sense it when we realise that our lives are lived in the controlled climate of air conditioning, but we still don't want to feel the weather outside.
Those are just its everyday manifestations. We feel it most keenly when we reach for the language of grief but find only platitudes, when we hurl the darkest wastes of our experience out into the ether and find no one willing to catch them. Something has been lost here, vanished beyond living memory: a fluency in the experiences that have patterned humanity since we began. We have surrendered the rites of passage that used to take us from birth to death, and in doing so, have rendered many parts of our experience unspeakable. We witness them anyway, separately, mutely, in studied isolation from our friends and neighbours who are doing the same. Centuries of knowledge are lost in this silence, generations of fellowship. Constantly surrounded by conversation, we are nevertheless chronically lonely.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“I was open to magic, and I found some, although not the magic I was looking for. That's what you find over and over again when you go looking: something else.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“I think I'm beginning to understand that the quest is the point. Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things; the sublime is note hiding in distant landscapes. The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It is transformed by our deliberate attention. It becomes valuable when we value it. It becomes meaningful when we invest in meaning. The magic is of our own conjuring. Hierophany--that revelation of the sacred--is something that we bring to everyday things, rather than something that is given to us. That quality of experience that reveals to us the workings of the world, that comforts and fascinates us, that ushers us towards a greater understanding of the business of being human: it is not in itself rare. What is rare is our will to pursue it. If we wait passively to be enchanted, we could wait a long time.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“Rilke's God wants to run through us like water through a pipe...Our work is to dissolve our boundaries to let in this boundless being, to allow ourselves to be overcome. We are not passive worshipers. We are not even conduits. We are trying to become superconductors.
Not everyone believes in a God like Rilke's, but meditation functions in a similar way. If you have a practice to follow, belief becomes neutral. You will find comfort either way. The hard part is surrender... You have to let it crack you open. You have to let it expose your beating heart. Sometimes that happens involuntarily. The light gets in by accident. But the problem is maintaining that wide-open heart, living with the vulnerability it brings. The problems is walking through life as a soft being whose skin is permeable. The problem is that you will need to take care of yourself if you life that way.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“Lately I wake in the night, and a few panicked seconds pass in which I can't locate myself. I could tell you my name, certainly, but not which version of me I'm dealing with.

Once, I was sure I was back in my teenage bed. I could almost hear the creak of its metal frame as I ticked over my timetable in my head (...). Unstable reality that it was, the illusion dissipated, and for a few floundering moments I was no one at all, just someone who remembered being that girl. Then I was me again, the me that exists now, in our blue upholstered bed with sea air surging through the window.

That was unusual. Mostly I am nobody when I wake up, just a consciousness in the darkness trying to piece it all together. It is a strange, free-floating moment, an unanchoring of the self. It is an interlude, like held breath. Eventually it releases, the lungs fill, the world floods in. A reassuring upload of facts. A reboot. I am back.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“In fact I think I prefer a strange tangle of both, an idea with porous boundaries that keeps me guessing. We are not offered any definite conclusions, only the continuing quest. Certainties harden us, and eventually we come to defend them as if the world can't contain a multiplicity of views. We are better off staying soft. It gives us room to grow and absorb, to make space for all the other glorious notions that will keep coming at us across a lifetime.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“We don't destroy colonial attitudes about the landscape by erasing people from it altogether, and forbidding their ever-morphing acts of meaning-making. We don't preserve our natural landscapes by turning them into inviting back gentleness into our relationship with the earth, by allowing meaning to take hold again. We should encourage enchantment to bolt like a weed. It is, after all, native here. The stones, and the dried-out heather, and the sound of the sea, and the moon above our heads have all been storing it like a battery, waiting for its current to be found again.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“It is the forgotten seam in our geology, the elusive particle that binds our unstable matter: the ability to sense magic in the everyday, to channel it through our minds and bodies, to be sustained by it. Without it, I feel I am lacking some essential nutrient, some vitamin found only when you go digging in your own soil.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age