Enchantment

Late at night, Katherine May wakes disoriented, unable to locate herself in time or space. For a few panicked seconds, she doesn't know which version of herself she's dealing with—the teenage girl in her metal-framed bed, or the woman in her blue upholstered bed with sea air flowing through the window. This floating sensation has become familiar, a symptom of something larger happening to many of us in this anxious age.

We live in times that conspire to make us feel impossibly small. The scale of constant change, rolling news cycles, and social fragmentation has left us running like frightened rabbits, flashing warning signals to each other without knowing what we're truly fleeing from. Somewhere in this frantic survival mode, we've lost touch with something fundamental—a capacity for wonder, for meaning-making, for what May calls enchantment. This book is a map back to that lost territory, showing us how to find magic not in grand gestures, but in the quiet acts of attention that reconnect us to the world and to ourselves.

On a hillside above Whitstable stands a circle of eight grey stones, erected in 2020 as the town's answer to ancient sacred sites. May approaches them with skepticism—what could these quarry-fresh boulders possibly offer compared to millennia-old megaliths? She finds the stones crumbling from their recent cutting, still bearing the violence of their extraction. Someone has left symbols on them—a yin-yang here, a sun there—and the remnants of a fire burn within the circle. Despite herself, May removes her shoes and walks barefoot through the long grass, feeling the stones' patient attention.

The stones offer no ancient wisdom, no mystical download of meaning. Instead, they provide something more precious: an exchange. May brings her troubled self to this place, and in return, the stones offer grace. She realizes she doesn't need to receive enchantment—she can create it. The sacred isn't something that descends from above, but something we weave through our willingness to tend forgotten places and listen to quieter voices. Even ersatz stone circles can become hierophanies when we approach them with genuine attention and care.

At sixty-something, May enrolls in swimming lessons, determined to perfect a front crawl that leaves her gasping after one length. Her instructor Wendy methodically deconstructs everything May thought she knew about swimming. What follows is not learning but unlearning—wrestling with muscle memory, watching as attempts to improve one aspect knock all others out of alignment. May discovers she's not a beginner but something more challenging: someone burdened with the work of forgetting what she thought she already mastered.

The pool becomes a laboratory for humility. May must release her ego's insistence that she already knows how to swim and submit to the vulnerability of being reformed. This process mirrors a larger unlearning happening in her life during the pandemic—the dissolution of old certainties and familiar rhythms. The water teaches her that some knowledge can only be absorbed through surrender, through the willingness to be taken apart and reassembled. True fluency, whether in water or in life, requires the courage to admit we know nothing and begin again.

A Japanese fairy tale captivates May as a child: "The Boy Who Drew Cats" tells of a young monk whose compulsive art-making gets him expelled from his monastery. Wandering to an abandoned temple haunted by a demon rat, the boy cannot resist drawing cats on every screen before falling asleep in a small cabinet. By morning, the demon lies dead, and his painted cats' mouths are stained with blood—his art has literally saved his life. This story becomes a beacon for May as she navigates her own relationship with creative fire.

Deep play, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz described it, involves players who are in over their heads, staking not just money but esteem and dignity on the outcome. May recognizes this quality in all profound attention, whether it's the boy's irrepressible need to draw cats or her own lifelong relationship with writing. The story teaches that our deepest compulsions—those seemingly impractical obsessions that others dismiss—may be precisely what saves us. The fire of creativity demands we follow it even when it leads us into dark temples, trusting that what we create in the shadows will protect us when morning comes.

On November 13, 1833, witnesses across America watched the sky rain fire as the Leonid meteor shower created an unprecedented celestial display. The Baltimore Patriot described stars "as numerous as ever I saw flakes of snow or drops of rain in the midst of a storm." This cosmic event sparked both scientific inquiry and spiritual reflection, becoming a fixed point in time that helped displaced people navigate their histories and artists find new metaphors for wonder.

May drives to Exmoor hoping to witness the modern Lyrid shower, but the bright supermoon washes out the meteors. Instead, she discovers something equally magical at her feet: moon shadows cast by light bright enough to create silhouettes on the clifftop. The quest itself transforms her perception, teaching her that enchantment rarely arrives as expected. Often we seek one form of wonder only to find another waiting in plain sight. The act of seeking—not the finding—attunes our senses and primes our minds for magic that was there all along.

Dressed in a white bee suit with tightly elasticated sleeves, May approaches her first hive with a mixture of anticipation and terror. The instructor teaches her to listen to the bees' changing pitch as she lifts frames heavy with honey and crawling with amber bodies. When he invites her to touch the bees directly, she feels their heat, their vibration, their industrious life. The hive exudes warmth and the sweet, woody scent of propolis, creating an atmosphere of complete immersion in interspecies communication.

This encounter represents more than learning a practical skill—it's an initiation into deeper forms of knowing. The bees teach through the body rather than the mind, through careful attention to pitch and temperature and the weight of living community. May realizes she doesn't want to rush into solo beekeeping but to learn slowly within a congregation of fellow keepers. The hive becomes a metaphor for the kind of embodied wisdom our culture has forgotten, knowledge that passes through the hands and the heart rather than through books and screens.

Through stone circles and swimming pools, burning creativity and falling stars, May discovers that enchantment isn't a mystical gift bestowed from above, but a quality of attention we can cultivate through practice. The sacred emerges not in grand revelations but in our willingness to tend forgotten wells, to submit to difficult learning, to follow our deepest creative impulses even when they seem impractical.

Her journey reveals that re-enchantment requires three essential elements: the humility to begin again when our old ways of knowing fail us, the patience to learn through our bodies rather than just our minds, and the courage to seek wonder even when—especially when—we don't know what we'll find. In a world that conspires to make us feel small and disconnected, these practices of attention become acts of resistance, ways of weaving ourselves back into the larger web of meaning that connects us to the earth and to each other.