Finding Magic in the Everyday

Wisdom from the Brilliant Katherine May

I didn’t know Katherine May when I first read her New York Times Bestseller, Wintering. I still didn’t know her when I read her next New York Times Bestseller, Enchantment. In fact, I didn’t even know that I could know her, until I went to a book event with my publisher, Riverhead, and learned that she and I were imprint siblings!

Katherine and I share a publisher, which is a writer-dork’s dream, because it means a writer-dork now has a pathway to befriending their writer crushes.

Katherine has long been one of mine. Her ability to call our attention to what we perceive as ordinary, and to help us see it as extraordinary — it’s a gift and a blessing, and it’s completely perspective-changing. That’s exactly why I wanted to speak to her for my podcast, Wisdom & Practice. And also because it was a coy way to get her to hang out with me for an hour.

We had an amazing conversation, and there are some thoughts she shared with me that are still swirling in my head. I hope you find this second episode as meaningful and thought-provoking as I have. I also hope you’ll follow Katherine’s writing here, if you don’t already. Her newsletter, The Clearing, is one of my favorites :)

Here’s a small taste of Katherine’s profound wisdom, taken from our conversation.

My perception is that actually, most children are born with that ability to sink their attention into tiny parts of the world that don't seem very significant but feel really enchanting to them, and that actually the process, the direction of the process, is that as we get older, we learn that that isn't the right way to do things. And in order to be an adult and to start to be sensible, to stop being so easily distracted, to stop noticing insignificant things and start to knuckle down into the serious.

So I would argue that actually, I think everybody has this capacity at some point in their lives, and that it's not a case of learning to do it. It's a case of unlearning the layer of adultness that we've put over the top of that noticing of kind of gradually breaking it through. And I definitely had to do that myself, and I think I've allowed my attention to flow back in that direction more and more over many years…

Hierophany is a term that I've reused from the sociologist Mircea Eliade, who created this word to describe, essentially, the incursion of the sacred into everyday life. So what that captures is how in religious practice and belief, certain objects will be imbued with the sacred.

Like in Christianity, the altar is a really good example of that, but the altar is not just a table, it's, you know, the focus of worship, and it is, in itself, an untouchable object. You know, to destroy it or to harm it in any way would be seen as a real transgression. Your personal hierophany might be the restaurant that your husband proposed to you in, for example, and he said, that's all well and good, but the problem is that's so individualistic.

We used to hold these hierophanies in common, which meant that we had this commonly held set of references, this way of reading the landscape together, and this shared mythology and folk belief that we could then talk about and use as a frame of reference through which we see the world…

I found that for me, gratitude has kind of flown from that place of resentment, towards a sense of it just emanating from the things I pay attention to. And the more I've engaged with the smallness of things, the details of the world, the easier I've found to just experience gratitude, rather than to force myself into it.

I suppose it comes back to discipline again that we've begun to present the word gratitude as another discipline that we must find. It came naturally when I let myself breathe and let myself notice all the incredible things in the world. It's a little bit like enchantment. It's there waiting for us, but we have to stop forcing it and stop treating it as like another thing to tick off our list.

Instead, let ourselves perceive how incredible it is to be alive in this world and what a pleasure It is to be surrounded by not just things that are beautiful, but the beauty of people and the way that they emanate this sacredness.

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