Katherine May on Enchantment, Building Community, Tasting Words, and a Drink of Lake Water

Summary

Contemplify Podcast — Katherine May on Enchantment, Building Community, Tasting Words, and a Drink of Lake Water

Host: Paul Swanson
Guest: Katherine May
Date: November 24, 2024

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Overview

In this episode of Contemplify, host Paul Swanson sits down with author and podcaster Katherine May to explore themes of enchantment, community, the contemplative life, “tasting words,” poetry as gut intuition, and the subtle power of attention—as well as how all of these are shaped by family and natural rhythms. Drawing from her bestselling book, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, May and Swanson engage in a warm, detailed, and often humorous conversation that invites listeners to slow down, deepen their sense of wonder, and consider how they might cultivate meaningful individual and communal practices—even in a fast-paced and fractured era.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting the Scene: Katherine May’s Context

• [02:28] Katherine May shares she’s at home in Whitstable, UK, just back from a writers’ retreat and soon to be flying to San Francisco. She admits to feeling sandwiched and a bit frantic, longing for the slower pace fostered during her retreat.

The Contemplative Life: Personal Longings and Challenges

• [05:35] Katherine May finds herself in “permanent craving” for a contemplative state:

  “There’s a real draw towards the quiet, the contemplative... permanent craving for a life lived in quiet and reflection, a life lived much more slowly, with much more space, made to let everything land... there’s a real need there.”

• Both host and guest discuss the nuanced tension (and synergy) between contemplative yearning and the busyness of raising children.

• [07:24] May highlights that children can invite as much contemplation as they “interrupt” it, recalling middle-of-the-night moments with her baby as “almost prayerful.”

Children and Contemplation: Respecting Space

• [08:19] May recounts a poignant story from Enchantment about taking her son for walks:

  “After a while he said, ‘When I walk like this, I feel like I’m growing branches in my head. And every time you talk, you chop one off.’”

• [10:14] May worries about modern childhood and the frenetic school pace:

  “We are doing harm... by just denying them of any space in their day at all, when they can just let things land, process, think.”

• [13:03] May and Swanson reflect on how past educational environments allowed for downtime, creative freedom, and more gentleness—contrasted with today’s intensity.

Formative Works & Education

• [13:31] May’s ‘syllabus’ for the formation of herself:
  • Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston: “So much of me springs from that book... it’s about aliveness, eeriness, starkness.”
  • Sylvia Plath’s Ariel: “That was like, wow, weird girls are writing poetry too. This is amazing.”
  • “First and foremost, I’d give kids a notebook and a pen... write everything down that’s in your head and see what poetry you can find in the everyday.”

Poetry as Spiritual Practice: Tasting Words

• [17:16] May admits to feeling undereducated in poetry, but sees it as “a toolkit... something to draw on and to be repeated.” She champions gut over analysis and shares a memorable poem:

  • [19:15] May reads “Everything Is Going to Be All Right” by Derek Mahon:

    “...The sun rises in spite of everything and the far cities are beautiful and bright. I lie here in a riot of sunlight watching the day break and the clouds flying. Everything is going to be all right.”

  • [20:03] Swanson: “That’s amazing. Thank you for introducing me to Derek.”

• May discusses “word tastings” and encourages not just children but adults to “find a poem you love and carry it in your pocket... and learn it by heart.”

• [23:16] May critiques “to be read pile” culture, advocating for slow, spacious, contemplative reading—“about spending an hour on one page... returning to the same idea over and over.”

Art, Wonder, and the Power of Attention

• The conversation turns to museum and art experiences:
  • [25:15] May recalls advice from a Tate Britain curator:

    “When you visit an art gallery, you should see no more than three paintings in one visit... You’ve only got attention for three intense encounters with paintings that you love.”

  • This principle, for May, applies just as much to reading poetry as to experiencing visual art—trust your taste, go deep, not broad.

Anxiety, Wonder, and Practicing Enchantment

• [31:30] Swanson observes how “awakening wonder” can serve as an antidote to both individual and collective anxiety.

• [31:30] May:

  “Wonder is the great queller of anxiety. It’s a leap into context... we see ourselves in the context of a bigger, wider world in which we are actually very small.”

  • Wonder brings humility and scale, softening perfectionist “optimal performance” pressures and “eaten by this anxious sense that we’re never good enough.”

  “Practicing wonder, not just waiting passively for it... is a way that I help my mental health.”

• May connects wonder to attention, arguing that anxiety is a “thief” of presence, pulling us into imagined futures or past regrets.

  “I lay my attention on my attention... anxiety just drags us out of living. It’s a really hard thing to live with.”

Community & Congregation: From Solitude to Shared Space

• [37:41] Swanson introduces May’s chapter “Congregation” as a favorite meditation on spiritual companionship and accountable community.

• Swanson quotes May from Enchantment:

  “Most of all, I want them to hold me to account, to keep me on track, to urge me towards doing good. Holding spiritual belief on my own is lonely.”

• They discuss the challenge of loneliness for spiritual seekers and the hunger for authentic, not just individualistic, spirituality.

• [41:30] May:

  “I think a lot of people are there right now... For that warm feeling of coming together, to be prayerful or to worship is something that’s just missing from loads of our lives. But, yeah, also there is an accountability there, too.”

• May describes the transformative power of collective silence during a writers' retreat (“there is a quality to shared intentional silence—it’s different to sitting on my own”), and how much more people would crave it if they tasted it.

New Forms of Congregation: Zen Peacemakers & Quaker Meetings

• [43:50] Swanson references the Zen Peacemaker order’s “three foundations”—not knowing, bearing witness, and taking action—and their influence on May.

• [44:00] May:

  “Before I witness, I’m taking a position of nothingness. It really helps us to listen that little bit deeper, to witness things that we otherwise would not witness...”

• May shares that she’s recently been attending Quaker meetings for their flat structure, commitment to silence, and communal accountability—all supportive of her yearning for “gathering.”

Family & the Loss of Extended Ties

• [47:41] May shares her grief at losing the tradition of extended weekly family gatherings, and the challenge of recreating community in a fragmented society:

  “For me, that's a real mission: how do I create and maintain that and live intertwined rather than live separately?”

• Both discuss the tension of privacy in families versus the isolation it can breed.

Water as Enchantment & Congregation

• [52:11] Swanson notes the motif of swimming and water in May’s work.

• [52:11] May:

  “I've always been really drawn towards water. For me, it's a gut response... Water is about this fluid joining together of a whole planet. When you're in a body of water, you feel in some way connected to all the other water...”

• She marvels at the science and magic of tides:

  “When we see the tide rise, we're seeing the pull of the moon... what we’re watching is a massive wave that is traveling around the world in concert with the moon. Isn't that just extraordinary? That’s real connection. Practicing wonder is about engaging with what is there. The more you engage, the more wonder you feel... it's magic, but it's a very grounded, very empirically based magic.”

Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

| Timestamp | Quote | Speaker | |-----------|-------|---------| | 05:35 | “There’s a real draw towards the quiet, the contemplative... permanent craving for a life lived in quiet and reflection.” | Katherine May | | 08:19 | “When I walk like this, I feel like I’m growing branches in my head. And every time you talk, you chop one off.” | May’s son, recounted by May | | 19:15 | (Reading Derek Mahon) “Everything is going to be all right.” | Katherine May | | 23:16 | “Let's have a conversation about making big space around books... about spending an hour on one page...” | Katherine May | | 25:15 | “When you visit an art gallery, you should see no more than three paintings in one visit...You’ve only got attention for three intense encounters with paintings that you love.” (paraphrased) | James Hurd, curator, via Katherine May | | 31:30 | “Wonder is the great queller of anxiety. It’s a leap into context... we see ourselves in the context of a bigger, wider world in which we are actually very small.” | Katherine May | | 37:41 | “Most of all, I want them to hold me to account... Holding spiritual belief on my own is lonely.” | Katherine May, from Enchantment | | 44:00 | “Before I witness, I’m taking a position of nothingness. It really helps us to listen that little bit deeper...” | Katherine May | | 52:11 | “Water is about this fluid joining together of a whole planet. When you’re in a body of water, you feel in some way connected to all the other water...” | Katherine May |

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Timestamps for Major Sections

• 00:05 – Episode opens and guest introduction
• 02:14 – May’s current context and recent retreat
• 05:35 – Defining the contemplative life, monastic longings, family tension
• 07:24–11:56 – Children and contemplation, “growing branches,” school structures
• 13:03 – Mandatory works for the “formation” of Katherine May
• 17:16–22:49 – Poetry as practice, "tasting words", poem reading
• 23:16–28:40 – Art, slowness, spaciousness in reading and gallery visits
• 31:30–36:27 – Anxiety, wonder, attention as practice
• 37:41–47:13 – Community, "Congregation" chapter, accountable spiritual friendship
• 47:41–51:10 – Family, loss of extended ties, creating chosen community
• 52:11–54:58 – Water as enchantment and embodied connection
• 55:35 – Closing ritual: “If you were to pair this conversation with a drink…”
• 56:08 – May: “I would drink some of your lake water... it’s a lovely way to connect to a place... that’s real integration.”

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Tone and Language

Richly contemplative, playful, honest, and invitational. May and Swanson meet in a spirit of curiosity and mutual encouragement, often sharing practical wisdom through story and metaphor, with gentle humor and an openness about their own limitations and longings.

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Practical Takeaways

• Reclaim Slowness: Prioritize depth over breadth in reading, art appreciation, and daily life.
• Honor Children’s (and Our Own) Need for Space: Recognize contemplative potential in ordinary moments—don’t rush or fill every silence.
• Practice Wonder Intentionally: Learn about the world; let science and poetry open portals.
• Carry Poetry as Toolkit: Find and repeat poems that resonate—let them work on you.
• Create Community, however imperfectly: Seek or build accountable, reflective congregations—whether familial, chosen, or spiritual.
• Engage with Nature as Sacred: Let natural phenomena (like water, tides, or sunrise) ground and reconnect you—sometimes even literally, with a sip of lake water.

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Closing

The episode invites listeners to slow down, savor, and seek enchantment—in nature, in art, and in one another. Katherine May’s voice is a gentle call to cultivate spaciousness and an enlarging sense of attention amid an anxious age. And if you’re thirsty for connection, or at least a taste of place, maybe join her for a symbolic drink of lake water.

Transcript

[Paul Swanson]

Welcome to Contemplify, where we seek to kindle the examined life for contemplatives in the world. I'm your host Paul Swanson. Today I'm in conversation with Catherine May. Catherine May is an internationally best selling author and podcaster living in Whitstable, uk. Her most recent book, Enchantment, became an instant New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller. Her internationally best selling hybrid memoir the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times was Adapted as a BBC Radio.

4'S Book of the Week.

It was shortlisted for the Porchlight and Barnes and Noble Book of the Year and if that wasn't enough, the Electricity of Every Living Thing, her memoir of a midlife autism diagnosis, was adapted as an audio drama by Audible. Katherine's podcast How We Live now ranks in the top 1% worldwide and she has been a guest presenter for on.

Bean's the Future of Hope series.

Katherine lives with her husband, son, two cats and a dog. She loves walking, sea swimming and pickling slightly unappealing things. Today, Catherine and I talk about tasting words, the wisdom of beholding only a handful of pieces and an art museum per visit. We examine the necessity and importance of community, drawing on specifically her chapter titled Congregation from her latest book, Enchantment Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. We talk about this and so much more. As always, you can visit contemplify.com for the show notes on this episode and learn more about katherine by visiting catherine-mayco.uk or sign up for her Substack newsletter or listening to her podcast How We Live Now. Now join me in raising a glass to my guest today, Katherine May.

Thank you so much for being here today. It's a thrill and an honor to be in conversation with you and as a way to begin, I always love to just ask where am I finding you today? What is the context and location that you are in right now?

[Catherine May]

I am at home here in my office, which I live about a five minute walk from the sea here in Whitstable. It's a really beautiful day actually. There's blue sky but in terms of in kind of time and space. I was on retreat all last week in Cornwall. I came back and I'm flying off to San Francisco tomorrow. So I'm like, I'm a little sandwiched. You know, everything's been a hurry this week. I don't like to do anything in a hurry and I'm just trying to sweep up all the weird loose ends that seem to occur before you go somewhere. So yeah, I'm a little more frantic Than normal, I'd say, oh, I get that.

[Paul Swanson]

That in between space. How was your retreat?

[Catherine May]

It was lovely. It was a group of writers and I often run retreats, but I rarely get to go on them. I'm normally holding the space.

[Paul Swanson]

Yeah.

[Catherine May]

And I realized that I really, really needed just some time. It's just so rare for me to get it. So I organized this retreat and invited other writers so that we could talk about the stuff that we do backstage. Because actually, I really think the role of a writer's changed in the last few years, particularly over the pandemic. And lots of us are really serving communities who are in need now in a very real way. Like, I'm beginning to think about it as a form of ministry. That's not necessarily a role that we intended to take. And I felt like we needed to get together and talk about that experience. And it was so much what I needed. I feel a lot lighter knowing that others are experiencing what I'm experiencing. Yeah, it was great.

[Paul Swanson]

That's lovely to hear. And you've kind of dropped a pre taste to what I'm hoping we can get to in a little bit around community, because that was a part of your work that I'm really intrigued by. And to hear this sense of a calling to a ministry type way of approaching your readers and those who are drawn to your work. I think it is a new age of what does community look like and how does one hold space for those who are allured to not only your work, but something you're evoking in them too, in their own life? I think that's a wonderful thing. And to me that that is so much the thrust of this podcast is around the contemplative life and all its beautiful manifestations, religious, philosophical, spiritual. In the natural world, of course. And as a way for folks who maybe don't know you to get a chance to know you. When you hear that word contemplative, how does that moniker relate to you and your work, if you think it does at all?

[Catherine May]

I think it really relates to my work and I think it's a state of being that I am in permanent craving for. I wrote about it in Enchantment a bit really that kind of pull towards this life lived in. In quiet and reflection, a life lived much more slowly, with much more space, made to let everything land as the mother of like a youngish child. That is. That feels very far away from me. But I do have very long standing nun fantasies, honestly, that I will one day get to live in some Kind of monastic order where silence reigns. And yeah, it's a big question for me, really, how I can bring that flavor into my life by being obviously very much of the world because it's so important that I'm present for all of those amazing family moments that are part of my life right now. There's a real draw towards the quiet, the contemplative, that. Yeah, there's a real need there.

[Paul Swanson]

Yeah.

As you said. So. Well, I have my wife and I have two little ones, a six year old and a nine year old. And so I am so drawn to silence and stillness and contemplative modalities of being in the world. And I'm not going. I'm also in love with being a father and a partner. And that what I love is just kind of the joyful, wandering challenge of how does one live in a contemplative way with children, I think there's joys and challenges and mishaps and lessons along the way.

[Catherine May]

Yeah, there's a real yearning there, isn't there, I think. And we tend to see children as entities that pull us out of contemplation, but there are also real moments of contemplation that they invite us into. Actually, Yes. I was thinking today, funnily enough, about those hours spent holding a baby, maybe in the middle of the night, maybe in an afternoon nap, when you realize that they are in your arms and you probably can't put them down for a while. And I was thinking about that as a really almost prayerful time when you were deeply engaged with that act of sustaining a tiny life. And I was thinking about that with some yearning, actually, I have to say. But now my son's 12 at the moment, and he often pulls towards quiet space in a way that I've had to learn to respect. I wrote about this in Enchantment as well, that we. At the beginning of the pandemic. You're smiling because you've read it already. It's kind of everyone's favorite part of the book. But I took him out for a walk in the woods because I wanted to teach him the names of the trees and be really sort of didactic in that sort of middle class, parent way. And after a while, and I was getting really frustrated because he was not paying any attention to me and I was like, but this is so important. And after a while he said, when I walk like this, I feel like I'm growing branches in my head. And every time you talk, you chop one off. I loved it. And we've Used it ever since. He now says, mom, you're chopping off my branches. But that really was pause for thought for me, because as someone who is really drawn to that mode of being myself, I'd failed to see that same pull in him, and I needed to learn to respect it. It was a beautiful thing.

[Paul Swanson]

Yeah.

What a line. And I'm glad to hear that it lives on in. In the daily banter because it's so rich.

[Catherine May]

Sometimes I get to say it back to him as well, but not quite as often, unfortunately.

[Paul Swanson]

Yes, you mentioned that. Just made me think about my youngest, who, whenever they wake up in the morning, they go sit on the couch and they put a blanket over their head for about 15, 20 minutes and just sit there and kind of absorb the newness of the day. And there's times where I want to interrupt because I'm excited to see them in the morning. I want to give them a hug or. And I'm like, I need to respect the space that's being claimed right now because it is a beautiful thing to watch a. A kid be able to articulate in words or in practice, too.

[Catherine May]

I mean, I. I worry so much about the. I mean, obviously I worry so much about the world they live in. Anyway, there's. There's a lot to worry about. But one of the things that concerns me is the way is the sort of acceleration that they're experiencing in their school life and how increasingly it's chopped up into smaller and smaller intense units. You know, there's no space made in that day. They're constantly doing something. You know, there are incursions into their lunchtime as well. So, you know, loads of kids skip eating. There's no space whatsoever. And I know I struggled in that environment, but it was much gentler in my day, and there was less electronic noise going on. There were no phones in people's hands, and it was slower. But now I do think that we have not acknowledged that we are doing harm. Not just by giving them iPhones or all of that stuff that we worry about in the newspapers, but actually by just denying them of any space in their day at all, when they can just let things land, process, think about how things are going, reframe the day. Like, I need that. And I'm pretty sure they do, too.

[Paul Swanson]

Well said.

Yeah.

That would be one of my wishes for the systems that help move our life is how can there be more spaciousness and slowness? Because the frenetic energy just builds up on itself. It feels like.

[Catherine May]

I think so. And I Think. We think that that's what they want, you know?

[Paul Swanson]

Yeah.

[Catherine May]

My aunt was a primary teacher and I had a lovely conversation with her a couple of years ago where she said, we used to send the kids out to dig the garden sometimes because we could see they needed it. We had them, you know, we used to read to them in the afternoons and they'd put their heads on their arms because they were tired. Those things are disappearing from our schools. And she was talking about neurodivergent children, which is obviously a big interest of mine. And she was saying, like, we didn't have the labels and the names and the precision that we have now, but we saw it, we knew they were there and we had the space in our curriculums to make room for them, to let different kids do different things and to sometimes just let them go and calm down a bit. That has gone. And I really think that a lot of kids are suffering under that regime.

[Paul Swanson]

Yeah, well said. How do we look at the curriculum of the. Of the life that's needed rather than just like an out of box? Here's what everyone should get in that spirit and to personalize it towards you. If someone were going to teach a class on the formation of Catherine May, what would be the three mandatory works that formed you that would definitely be on that syllabus?

[Catherine May]

Oh, my goodness. That is. That is really, really hard.

[Paul Swanson]

It can be. Just for today.

[Catherine May]

Just for today. Yeah. As a child, I was actually not a great reader. I did read, but when I mostly meet writers, they read loads and loads and loads and loads and loads. I did not actually, but I wrote loads. And I think. I think first and foremost, I'd say I would give kids a notebook and a pen. That would be the class. Like, just write what's in your head. Write everything down that's in your head and see what poetry you can find in the everyday. That was my absolute obsession. But I also. There's a book called the Children of Green Know by Lucy M. Boston. It's a children's novel and it is this beautiful Christmas story. You can hear all the kind of themes coming in. It's a Christmas story. So it's set in winter, it snows for sure. And it's about a little boy who goes to stay with his grandmother in her big, grand old manor house and meets all the ghost children that lives there and plays with them. And I just think that so much of me is springing from that book, from the language of it, from the eeriness of it, the starkness of It. But it's also full of, like, when I read it again as an adult, beautiful consideration of what it means to be alive or dead and what that kind of. What those ghosts mean that they're there.

[Paul Swanson]

Wow.

[Catherine May]

And how time operates. I wish I've never persuaded my son to read it. He's utterly disinterested in it because I want him to read it. I wish more children would definitely read that. It's so intensely beautiful. And then to kind of represent teenage me, I'd have everyone read Sylvia Platt and Ariel. That was a big one for me. That was like, wow, Weird. Girls are writing poetry too. This is amazing.

[Paul Swanson]

What a list. I love that. Thank you. The children's book is new to me, so I'll be excited to poke into that.

[Catherine May]

It's an English classic, but it's a little bit like the Box of Delights and all of those great books. There was an era, the sort of mid century era of like British children's writing that everything got a bit weird and like, yeah, creepy. And there was this sort of sense of the old gods coming in, the old English gods, you know, the Green man keeps making an appearance and there's like. There's often like, I don't know, Herne the Hunter coming in or Pan or something. And I just. They were. Yeah, that's a. It's a vibe. It's. It's a real vibe and I like it.

[Paul Swanson]

That's fantastic. That's fantastic. You mentioned Sylvia Plath. And I'm always. I try to read at least a few poems a day, almost like medicine for withstanding the barrage of other news coming in. Is there any poem of recent that has touched you or cracked you open that you wouldn't mind sharing the name of or how it worked itself on you?

[Catherine May]

Yeah, I mean, I read a fair amount of poetry myself and I, you know, I feel very poorly educated in poetry, actually. And I. That's on me. And I keep stumbling across poems that everybody else is really aware of and they're completely new to me and I, you know, like Mary Oliver is not as famous in the UK as she is in America, for example. You know, that's. It's blown my mind in the last few years that Mary Oliver exists like that.

[Paul Swanson]

Right.

[Catherine May]

I'm searching through my phone and the reason I'm doing that is because I now keep a little app album of photographs of poems so that I can have them with me all the time. Because my feeling about poetry is that it's a toolkit, almost like it's something that we. That's designed for us to draw on and also like to be repeated, you know? And I don't think. I don't think we learn to think about poetry in that way anymore. We study it and if you're lucky, you like it, but that might put you off. And we see it as very highfalutin and clever and sort of super intellectual. And I don't think good poetry is any of those things. I think good poetry just hits you square in the gut.

[Paul Swanson]

Yeah.

[Catherine May]

The one that I want to share with you, and I wanted to get the title right because I keep getting it wrong. That I. That I discovered recently and I turned back to a lot, is called Everything Is Going To Be all right by Derek Mahon. He's a Northern Irish poet, and it's a beautiful meditation on just being there in the moment. Would you like me to read it to you or would that.

[Paul Swanson]

I would love to, if you have.

[Catherine May]

It available, ruin your whole podcast. Yeah, I've got it in my little folder. How should I not be glad to contemplate the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window and the high tide reflected on the ceiling? There will be dying. There will be dying but there's no need to go into that. The poems flow from the hand unbidden and the hidden source is the watchful heart. The sun rises in spite of everything and the. The far cities are beautiful and bright. I lie here in a riot of sunlight Watching the day break and the clouds flying. Everything is going to be all right. Isn't that lovely?

[Paul Swanson]

That's amazing. That's amazing. Thank you for introducing me to Derek. I look forward to dig into that poem and more of his work. That's amazing.

[Catherine May]

It's so simple, isn't it? And for me, they're the poems that I always love. The Sylvia Plath one that sort of ends today. I will not disenchant. My 11 blackgowned examiners has a really similar feel to that poem. It's that sense of something about to happen, but in that moment, you're just being. And that captures a big cloud of feelings that I think we all carry throughout life. Really? Yeah.

[Paul Swanson]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Catherine May]

Wow.

[Paul Swanson]

I feel like we're cut from the same cloth around poets and poetry that we like and are drawn to, because I think, like, poetry that's a little bit dusty, it's got some earth on it. Or maybe it's like those poems are the ones that punch me in the gut in the best way possible, where my breath is gone, but I Have to. I've been broken into a new world because of that poem. And that is a gift that poetry, I feel, offers.

[Catherine May]

They should really just break open little windows, I think. I've spent a lot of time working as a writer in schools, and I so often found that when I talked to kids about poetry, they would be scared of it because they'd been encouraged to analyze it before they felt it. Like, I love analyzing poetry, but you've got to feel it first. And I used to sit with them and just say, no, no, no, no. I don't want anything clever said about it. I just want you to tell me how that feels in your gut. Like, did you like it? Did you. Did it make you. Did it give you chills? Did it give you tingles? Like, what did that do? And what about this word? Like, how does that. Let's taste that word. We used to do word tastings with that for a little while. And I. Yeah, I love that's. I wish we taught that before. I wish we had the confidence to teach that to children before anything else. Like, find a poem you love and carry it in your pocket and learn it, learn it by heart, and then you'll always carry it around. Like, that's all you ever need to do. If you want to go past that, wonderful. But you would have given children something if you give them that. And adults, you can do that for yourself now, guys, that's a choice you get to make now.

[Paul Swanson]

Yes, I am a big fan of the spiritual practice Lectio divina. And using obviously sacred text is beautiful, but also using poetry to chew on it and to let it. Just. The word tasting is not going to be a part of my language. So thank you for that. The way that when you allow it to just settle in the tongue and you have to digest it is. I think some magic can happen in that way.

[Catherine May]

Well, and of course, you know, lecture divina emphasizes repetition, reading over and over again. And I wonder how often we think about repetitive reading now or contemplative reading in particular, because I think, you know, that our language around books now is about the to be read pile and about the teetering to be read pile, and it's about this kind of excess. We bought too many books and we don't know what to do with it. And we feel this pressure and we're hurrying. Five minutes with a book, or. Yeah, we're reading it on public transport while the noise is going around us. And, like, read a book whenever you can. Sure. But let's have a Conversation about making big space around books as well, about spending an hour on one page, about diving between the page and your notebook because you, you need to empty your head about it and about returning to the same idea over and over again. And that sense of excavation you get over time when you see a new thing in one line, the more you return to it. That's so beautiful. It's removing the hurry from reading and the sort of competitivity. I think.

[Paul Swanson]

Brilliant. I couldn't agree more. I am burdened and blessed with the gift of fast reading. I can read quickly, but also.

[Catherine May]

I.

[Paul Swanson]

Have to be intentional to slow down. I was gifted with that experience recently of reading a book of poetry by Lee Young Lee. And I couldn't get past the first page, the first poem. I just kept being like, wow. I would stop and then I would read it again. Took me a few weeks to get past that first poem because it was. I was listening to that invitation to slow down.

[Catherine May]

Do you know what? I think one of the things that people that don't read poetry don't understand about poetry is that in the whole collection, in the whole book that you're reading, you might only find one or two that you really love. And that's completely fine. And what I love about poetry is that you don't have to be systematic with it. Actually you can sort of browse through and land on one that's gorgeous and be with that. And that's all you need to do. There's actually no pressure, no one's monitoring to see whether you read the whole thing. It doesn't matter. And I learned that from working in an art gallery, actually working in the Tate Britain. And I was walking around with a curator and I felt so honored to be there with all these incredible paintings. But I also felt really intimidated and really like I didn't know enough to be here. Like, how dare I? How dare I be doing this? And I was taken around one day by a lovely curator called James Hurd. And he said to me, when you visit an art gallery, you should see no more than three paintings in one visit. And I was like, what? That's a waste. I mean, you know, you've come all the way up to London on the train and you've paid for a ticket. And he said, you've only got attention for three intense encounters with paintings that you love. And he said, I watch people every day. They come in through the door and they file around every room like anti clockwise and look at every painting for a couple of minutes and Go, hmm. And move on. And they look at the next one, and maybe they read the label. And they probably spend more time reading the label than they spend looking at the picture. And he said, look, you go in, you have a little look around the room, and you zone in on the painting that speaks to you or the piece of sculpture that speaks to you, and you stand still in front of it and really look at it. And you may read the label, but that is not mainly what you're here to do. And that really changed me, actually, because I was definitely doing the filing past the paintings thing. And what he was saying was, you know, trust your taste. We worry so much about being tacky or not clever enough or, I don't know, just naive about all of the things there in front of us. And he sort of said, none of that matters. You haven't got to demonstrate anything to anyone. What you deserve is this beautiful relationship that you can form with a piece of art. And it really has stuck with me. And I apply it to poetry now. Yeah.

[Paul Swanson]

Oh, that's beautiful. What a gift from a curator. To be able to. And for you to receive that and then apply it to other aspects of life as well, that's going to change the way I show up at the next art museum I go to.

[Catherine May]

That's it. That's your lot.

[Paul Swanson]

And it makes sense, right? Because there is, like, that kind of museum hangover when you've been there too long, you've absorbed too much, and you're, like, just foggy, and you just want to leave. But, like, you're trying to get, quote, unquote, your money's worth. And, like, that's not the point.

[Catherine May]

An interesting notion. Yeah. That your money's worth is quantity.

[Paul Swanson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Catherine May]

And we know that people often spend longer in the gift shop than they do in the gallery. And, like, that is. That's us. That's us. We want a pretty thing to bring home. We don't feel secure to have to stand still, because people would see us standing still, and that would feel weird. And we're not sure that we trust ourselves to really get it. And we can. We can. I know that because I spent a long time taking kids around galleries saying, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm handcuffing you to this painting. Stand still. There's a lot to see. And you'd watch them look of it. And I would learn a new thing about those paintings every time I've looked at it with a group of kids, because they. They spot detail, they understand Things about it. They read stories into it, and it's really beautiful. And I. Yeah, I now am a very scant gallery observer quite often.

[Paul Swanson]

That's great. Well, I'm excited to talk about your book because I feel like, in the way that you just invited us into approach art museums with a sense of spaciousness. I feel like your book does that to the containers it holds for. Not just how you structure it with the four elements, but then each chapter holds a sense of spaciousness that. I mean, I felt like I could have read it out of order. I didn't, but I could have, and I would have been able to. To just receive the same gifts from it.

[Catherine May]

Okay, well, the secret is that I never write it in order, so you almost certainly could read it.

[Paul Swanson]

I love it. We're revealing secrets here. And the title, Enchantment Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, is so beautiful. And I think really encapsulates, obviously, the spirit of the book. And as I was thinking about it, I think about when we're not in control, but we clamor for control. We create buckets and buckets of anxiety that we splash on ourselves and spill into others and just kind of spreads. And I think as you talk about, the pandemic did this in spades for legitimate reasons about fear and what was happening, but also just the ways in which we can kind of crank up our own anxiety when we're disconnected from self, others, and sometimes we can't control it otherwise, too. But awakening wonder is such a natural antidote for a part of a way to respond to massive anxiety. How would you describe the relationship between anxiety and wonder?

[Catherine May]

Oh, goodness. I think they're much more intertwined than. Than we probably want to admit. And I think wonder is the great queller of anxiety. It's a leap into context. I think when we experience wonder, we see ourselves in the context of a bigger, wider world in which we are actually very small. And wonder takes us into the space of humility. And what humility does is relieve us of a whole load of the stuff that's causing our anxiety. This isn't the cause of all anxiety, but for so much of us, we're expecting great things all the time, you know, like optimal performance in all areas of life at all moments. And it's not possible. It's absolutely not possible. And therefore, we get eaten by this anxious sense that we're never good enough. And for me, wonder, like practicing wonder, not just, like, waiting passively for it to come, like, once a decade, but practicing wonder deliberately is a way that I help my mental health by reframing who I am and feeling like, oh, I'm just a really insignificant human being who doesn't have to worry about saving the whole world because she can't, you know, but what she can do is be in relationship with the world and therefore in a reciprocal relationship with it. So, yeah, for me, they are really important as a relationship. But also I think what I really notice is that we're often anxious about our ability to feel wonder or whether, like, whether wonder is a legitimate thing to want to feel, whether it might. Oh, it's a bit too. It's a bit tacky, it's a bit light. It's not the business of a serious person who should be shouting at people on Twitter about, sorry, X. I will never get mad about what's on the news. Like, that's what a serious person does. And an unserious person feels wonder because they're not engaged. And I. Yeah, I don't agree, actually. I really don't agree. Yeah, I think we need this. I think we really need permission to think on a different level because we cannot carry on functioning in the way that we're trying to function right now, which is this constant sense of urgency and threat. Like, if that's visiting you at your doorstep, then bless you and you have to do that. But for most of us, we're actually feeling this precognition of threat, this terror of impending doom that isn't there yet and it's not going to help us to deal with whatever comes. We're just more exhausted when it comes. And so, yeah, it's about finding a way to recharge.

[Paul Swanson]

Yeah.

Thank you for saying that. And I think one thing I learned in thinking about this in relation to your book was the relationship to attention, to both anxiety and wonder. How I feel. Like, anxiety kind of takes attention, steals attention, and wonder kind of expands it. And the way that you move through the book, I can feel you pointing towards that in different ways. And it was a really helpful thing for me to kind of need into my own reading practice of, like.

[Catherine May]

Yeah, that's interesting.

[Paul Swanson]

When am I feeling the anxiety of, like, I should be done with this book by now, versus what a gift to have this book open on my lap. And I'm. It brought me some other things that I'm considering and wondering. It is like an invitation to the practice of wonder.

[Catherine May]

Yeah, I. That's a lovely. That's a really lovely way of thinking about it. And I. I really observe now. I lay my Attention on my attention. When I'm paying meta attention, what I really notice is that when I'm anxious, my attention is constantly being stolen by the anxiety itself. And so I'd be mid conversation with my son and suddenly I'm elsewhere and it's a thief. It's an absolute thief. Or I'll reach to my phone because everything suddenly feels overwhelming. And the most soothing thing I can do in that second, in that millisecond is pick that up and then I'm in Instagram and then I'm upset about something else.

[Paul Swanson]

Yeah.

[Catherine May]

And I wish there was a solution to solve that. And the solution isn't scolding ourselves, incidentally, and saying, we are really wrong about this. But I think by noticing my patterns, I can learn to observe when I am anxious before the bigger signs come. And that often manifests in a slipping of attention out into an imagined future that hasn't happened yet, where I'm already arguing with somebody, fighting for my, like, fighting for my rights with whoever it is that's impinging on them, or I'm slipping back into the past, into a conversation that has upset me. Anxiety just drags us out of living. And it's a really hard thing to live with. It's a really painful thing. And therefore it degrades our relations right in that present time. So, yeah, that laying of attention always really reveals, I think, interesting things. I'm sort of very into attention. I think a lot of my writing is just about attention, really. Not getting attention, paying attention.

[Paul Swanson]

Yeah, yeah, I can see that. The pain, attention. And what you just said a moment ago about how anxiety can degrade our relations and I think to the many layers of relations. And as I was thinking about this conversation and there are so many portals of possibility that I knew we could go down. And the fact that you mentioned that we've been talking about attention that you mentioned at the top of our conversation about this sense of almost ministry to your readers and that kind of community that forms around that. You have this lovely chapter and enchantment called Congregation, which is one of the chapters that just. I enjoyed pausing with and thinking through my own relationship to communities and self. I think similar to you, I'm kind of naturally lean towards the solitary or intimate friendships and also know the gift of accountable community. And that's where I've been kind of striving to put more energy. Striving is the wrong word. Welcoming. To put more energy and attention. There's. I want to read you back to you for a second, say a Quote and then have a question about it. So you're talking about this kind of longing for community, and you say to reflect and contemplate, to hear the ways that offers that Others have solved this puzzling problem of existence. Most of all, I want them to hold me to account, to keep me on track, to urge me towards doing good. Holding spiritual belief on my own is lonely. I want to be part of a group that makes me return to ideas that bewilder and challenge me. And this is one of those paragraphs that's underlined, exclamation point, star next to it. Because I have a relationship with this chapter very deeply. I think it's a beautiful invocation to kind of the loneliness I think many of us feel on this spiritual journey in search of accountable community.

[Catherine May]

Yeah, I think a lot of people are there right now, actually. It's interesting. I'm really picking that up as a theme from loads of different people. And from my own perspective. I have never been a member of a church. I've never been a regular member of a congregation. I come from parents who are atheists, and I sampled it because I sung in choir, and I did that all through school. But then I also, at university, sung in my chapel choir, which was like a huge commitment. And I sang two summer even songs a week and then a rehearsal to do the music. And that time I spent in chapel, although I didn't relate to the religious beliefs and often found them quite alienating in lots of ways, I did love the sense of rhythm, the sense of coming together. For that warm feeling of coming together, to be prayerful or to worship is something that's just missing from loads of our lives. But, yeah, also there is an accountability there, too. And I. I think that's important, actually, that we don't allow our reaching towards a more gentle spirituality to become individualistic and therefore to be used to just justify anything. I see so much of that coming across on the socials, like, you are always right, everyone else is always wrong, and here's some God thrown in to justify that. Not okay. And, like, equally, I want to be held to account for that too. I don't just mean it as a sort of, you know, sledgehammer against other people. Yeah. What do we do? What do we do about that? How do we form a new kind of congregation that lets us be reflective together. I got some ideas, but I don't think I've got the ideas. I do know that when I was on my retreat last week, we had, as part of the building, we were in. There was a 11th century chapel, beautiful little chapel, long ago deconsecrated. And I opened it up every morning at 7 o' clock for an hour's silent sit. And whoever wanted to come could come and they could do whatever they wanted as long as it was in silence. And I experienced there a thing that I've experienced so many times in my life, which is that there's a quality to shared silence, to shared intentional silence. It's different to doing what I've always done, which is sitting on my own at home meditating or reflecting or reading. I wish. I want more people to just taste that, because if they did, they'd crave it. They'd know that they needed it. It's really important, I think.

[Paul Swanson]

Yeah, I'm with you. That's so beautiful that you did that on your retreat. Part of the practice communities that I'm a part of during the pandemic, we shifted to zoom as a way to practice together, which is great, but it's not the same, not the same as sitting in silence together. So I resonate with that. And as you think about this, kind of how you're thinking about potentially forming community, I think about your experience that you write about with the Zen peacemaking order, and that there's these three foundations of not knowing, bearing witness and taking action. How do you think kind of those foundational pieces might influence you and what you would maybe create before a healthy congregation in your own world, that beginning.

[Catherine May]

Of everything that peacemakers do. And they see it as their responsibility to learn about the great wrongs of our society, be it the Holocaust, be it slavery. And they always begin from this position of not knowing. So letting go of anything you think you know because it's so often useless anyway, and coming to it completely afresh, learning to listen deeply, learning to set aside your pre existing ideas and beliefs and prejudices, and only then can you truly bear witness. And that is such, I think, that flips so much of what we think we know. Honestly. We praise ourselves for bear, for bearing witness to these awful events that are paraded in front of us the whole time. And it's hideous. And we. It hurts us. We are in pain because we cannot bear it. And we feel so helpless and disgusted and angry and all of those emotions. But to reverse that and to say before I witness I taking a position of nothingness is really radical. It really helps us to listen that little bit deeper, to witness things that we otherwise would not witness at all because we think we know about them, to see complexity which we need to see, even though that makes these things really complicated and difficult and to hear the other side, because that's what we need to do. I love the time I spent with the Zen peacemakers. They were really extraordinary. And I went on to think about how I could join a regular congregation like that. And in fact, I've been attending Quaker meetings recently because I think in my own backyard, where I can be there in person and not on zoom. Because I. I do think that's a different kind of relationship. That's the closest I found. And Quakers sit in silence together for an hour. And they also. They do work from a position of not knowing. They have no liturgy in their services. They don't really believe in being preached to or instructed in any way or even led. They have a completely flat organizational structure. They have to figure out how to get along in that, and they. To do that, they have to come from a position of not knowing. And it's a really similar belief. And, yeah, it's been very interesting for me to turn up to that congregation every week, even though I'm not someone that likes turning up to things, committing myself to that. And in fact, what I found are a lot of other quiet people who nevertheless realize the huge value in gathering and the huge purpose that can be found and the good, the genuine good that can be done when we do it.

[Paul Swanson]

That's lovely to hear.

And how that's been an ongoing unfolding for you in silence and congregation and bearing witness. And I was thinking about, too, about my own little nuclear family and yours. How do you approach that sense of congregation with your little unit, with your husband and son and animals and all.

[Catherine May]

The things currently a cat, a dog, and a lizard.

[Paul Swanson]

Perfect.

[Catherine May]

Yeah. I have a lot of grief about that, actually, because we are the smallest possible nuclear family unit, really. And I felt that when I was a child, I was part of an extended family. And now I don't think my son does have that experience. My family used to gather, like my mum and her sister, my grandparents, we two cousins. That's not loads of us, but it's definitely bigger than anything else. We used to get together every Sunday for Sunday lunch, and it was boring and it was repetitive. And it's the thing in my life that I miss the most. It was this beautiful touchstone, and now we're scattered. Everybody lives in a different place. And I, you know, like, I didn't have siblings. I have step siblings, but we've never lived together, so we don't feel that closeness. You know, we Always, we get on, but we always joke that we're like three separate only children and we don't know how to be brother and sister. We're rubbish at it, unfortunately. No matter, you know. And you can't, like, you can't fake that relationship even if you want to. Like, we like each other. We get on, but it's not the same as having grown up in the same house. Yeah. So I've produced one child. My cousin's produced one child. Like, so we're sort of dwindling. And that for me is. It gives me a sense of huge grief. I really think if families are good to each other and I. And I certainly sure that they aren't always like, my husband comes from a different, very different kind of a family. But the value of those bigger relationships and that sort of amazing sense of rootedness it can give you is something that I've lost and I can't fake it. I can't remake it, I can't produce it. There's no babies left in me. And even if there were, there's still. One of the reasons I haven't had more than one child is because I haven't got a network around me that lives nearby that can support me. And that was something that I felt so strongly when I had my son, was how suddenly it felt like our lives was very private. Whereas before we'd been in and out of houses with our friends and then suddenly we all settled down and had children very separately.

[Paul Swanson]

Yeah.

[Catherine May]

And we now have good friends who we are much more entangled with. But it's. We've had to rebuild those relationships. And I just think in general there's this tendency for us to really. To separate and to. Then there's this, I don't know, sociological phrase from the 50s. Create the privatized nuclear family. It's behind closed doors. And we think that's a virtue, but what it actually means is that we are isolated and we don't see each other. For me, that's a real mission. Like, how do I create my. I have to create my family now. How do I create and maintain that and live intertwined rather than live separately?

[Paul Swanson]

Well said. Well said. What you were just sharing about that sense of rootedness one can find or in that type of expansive family. In this chapter, you. You sandwich it between kind of stories on swimming and this swimming with a friend and then with your grandfather. And there's something that's. I found so grounding about because I love to swim. I grew up in a lake country In. In the States here. And like, so there was a lake behind my house. So before school I'd go swimming and like all those. The luckiest thing in the world. And there's something about water that is so you feel held and beheld and like, how do you see water? As almost like the ultimate congregation. This is part of what I took away. How does water sustain and hold you? Like a congregation of the natural world?

[Catherine May]

Yeah. I've always been really drawn towards water. And I. I was the kid that couldn't be. They couldn't let go of my hand on the beach because I'd be like zombie walking neck deep before they knew it, you know? Yeah. For me, it's a gut response in lots of ways that I think. And not everyone is drawn to water in this way, and particularly wild bodies of water. But I need it. Like, it gives me this sense, as you say, of being held. But also, water is about this fluid joining together of a whole planet. When you're in a body of water, you feel in some way connected to all the other water. Like it's full of possibility. And I think as I get older, that takes on more symbolism. And, you know, I wrote an enchantment about noticing finally how the tides behave and really thinking about what that means. The moon is pulling on this vast thing that is the sea, this unfathomably vast thing. And when we see the tide rise, we're seeing the pull of the moon. And I never understood, until I did the research for that book that the tide does not go in and out. That has nothing to do with it. That what we're watching is a massive wave that is traveling around the world in concert with the moon.

[Paul Swanson]

Wow.

[Catherine May]

And what an incredible vision that is to hold in your mind for science's sake. I have to say that there's also a bulge at the opposite side of the planet, the moon as well, because of the lack of gravity. It's confusing. On one side it's the gravity, the other side it's, oh, there's nothing holding me in place. I'm going to bulge anyway. Try not to worry about it. Either way, when the tide is high, that's when the moon is. It's the movement of the moon. We're witnessing our place in the solar system. And isn't that just extraordinary? That's real connection. And that takes me back to the point you made about practicing wonder. That's how you practice wonder. You learn about stuff. It's not divorced from science. It doesn't make you a kind of weird moon unit. It is instead about actually engaging with what is there. And the more you engage, the more wonder you feel like you can't help but feel wonder about how the tides are moving. It's magic, but it's a very grounded, very empirically based magic, which is the best kind in lots of ways. I think no one can argue with that magic.

[Paul Swanson]

Amen. I love that. I love that. What a note to end on. You've dropped us off the doorstep of Enchantment here with that, and that's so lovely. I hope everyone listening reads Enchantment. It is an incredible book that we dove deeper into one particular chapter, but there's so many ways we could have gone. So thank you for doing that with me. And as a way to close, I always like to ask our guests to keep it embodied, to keep it grounded in the real. If you were going to pair this conversation with a drink, what would be your drink of choice and why?

[Catherine May]

Oh well, I would drink some of your lake water. Yes, it's probably a bit of a naughty habit, but I do like a little bit of a taste of the water I'm swimming in. And I do now have a filter that lets me filter the water so that it's maybe not quite so risky to my immune system. But I just think it's a lovely way to connect to a place is to drink the water that you're swimming in. Walking by, listening to. That's real integration, isn't it?

[Paul Swanson]

Yes.

Perfect answer. That's great. Thank you so much, Catherine Foreign thank.

You for listening to this slow cooked episode of Contemplify. May its delights spark wonder and may any sour patches be sweetened by their folly. Head over to contemplify.com to find the show notes for this episode. Sign up for the monthly Contemplify non Required Reading list and also the weekly Contemplative practice. Lo Fi and Hushed. If you are enjoying Contemplify, rate and review it on your podcast player. The Internet tells me this helps spread the contemplative cheer. The theme song for Contemplify is called Langside by Charles Ends and Darren Hoveus. Fellas, thanks as always and of course I am looking forward to bringing you more musings and more conversations with contemplatives kindling the examined life in the world. Until then, be well.