Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Awakening Wonder with Katherine May

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

We’ve all gotten trapped in the social media & news loop: Checks Twitter, scrolls on Instagram, reads comments, watches the news, checks Twitter, reads comments, checks the news again… and the cycle continues. Today’s guest, international best-setting author Katherine May, invites us to join her on a journey or reawakening in her newest book, Enchantment. Explore the art of reconnecting with the world around you, and learn to see the humanity of others. Whether it’s a gorgeous sunset, a mossy rock, or your sourdough starter, wonder is all around us if we can practice mindfulness, engage our curiosity, and look for it. Special thanks to our guest, Katherine May, for joining us today.  Host/ Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder  Production Coordinator: Andrea Champoux Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Buy from dysoncanada.ca. With ANC on, performance may vary based on environmental conditions and usage. Accessories sold separately. Hello, friends. Welcome. Delighted to have you with me today. And oh my goodness, today's conversation with Catherine May. You need this. You need this in your life. Her new book is called Enchantment. And if you have been feeling just a tremendous amount of anxiety about the state of the world, about your own life, you need to listen to this conversation. It is not a self-help conversation. She's not a therapist, but this is something that all of us can do and it can help us all improve our lives and feel better and live lives that are more full of

wonder and peace and joy. And I just loved this conversation so much. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I'm Sharon McMahon, and want to say it was like page five. And I was like, this is absolutely the way almost everyone I know feels. And I just want to read this little section and I want to hear your comments on it. You say the last decade has filled so many of us with a growing sense of unreality. We seem trapped in a grind of constant change without ever getting the chance to integrate it. Those rolling news cycles, the chatter on social media, the way that our families have split along partisan lines, it feels as though we've undergone a halving, then a quartering,

and now we are some kind of social rubble. If there was a spirit of this age, it would look a lot like fear. For years now, we've been running like rabbits. We glimpse a flash of white tail, read the danger signal, and run, flashing our own white tail behind us. It's a chain reaction, a river of terror surging incoherently onwards, gathering up other wild alert bodies who in turn signal their own danger. And I could just keep reading. I could just be like, and now- I love the way you read that. You made it sound like beat poetry. It was wonderful. Thank you. But I was like, if there were a spirit of this age, it would look a lot like fear. And I totally relate to this growing sense of unreality. And I hear from so many, literally thousands of people, just articulated exactly how so many people,

not just in the United States, but around the world feel. And I want to hear you talk a little bit more about your experience with this sort of growing sense of unreality? Yeah, the word unreality is so key there, isn't it? It's hard to pin down where that unreality resides. I mean, I just had the experience today of being on one of those eternal customer service calls where you get shunted between a real human being and then a machine and then back again and then you have to call somewhere else and nobody nobody's got any decision making power and there's no there's no contact in that system and after a while you begin and you know that's just one of many experiences across our days I think that don't feel real anymore. They don't feel like

real life. It doesn't feel like you're making any contact with actual human beings. And it also, it does weird things to your perception of who you are in this world and what you do with your time. It's so pointless and purposeless. And yet we are constantly engaged in conversations like that. And that's just one dimension of this explosion that has happened in the course of your and my lifetimes that really has gone from everything being face toto-face to living in a society that we all felt like we understood its values, even if we didn't agree with them. We felt like we got the parameters of what was happening, that there was a basic sort of social contract between all of us and it was largely civil.

And it's really hard to actually account for the amount of change we've lived through and the level of fear we're now feeling not just about pandemics not just about the risk of global wars breaking out but of basic contact with each other because we've drifted so far away from that being an everyday experience that it's become frightening to us. And we spend so much time in speculation about how terrible other people might be that it's fed this very different reality for us. We spend so much time in speculation about how terrible other people might be. Wow, that is so true, Catherine. We devote a lot of our energy to thinking about how terrible a different group is, a group that we're not a part of.

But what's really interesting is that these are groups that maybe we're not that far away from necessarily, you know, these are groups that are people in our own family who 10 years ago, we'd have comfortably sat around a dinner table with and been fairly relaxed about our differences and I think because of social media and because of the way that we see people now you know we we get to see people's opinions rather than their humanity that has escalated into this sense that we we cannot tolerate each other, that we are monstrous to each other on every side of the political spectrum, wherever you sit on it. And there's a real tragedy to that. There's a real loss that we're enduring. And then, of course, we've been through a period

when we were kept away from each other in lockdowns. And we've emerged back into this world very unhealed from it and very, very, very distant from actually having a social skill set that will let us feel comfortable in those places that used to comfort us, that used to feel safe and ordinary to us. that used to comfort us, that used to feel safe and ordinary to us. You say in your book, when I want to describe how I feel right now, the word I reach for the most is discombobulated. It captures perfectly my state of mind, confused, disoriented, out of sorts. And I feel like so many people can relate to that, like trying to find new footing, trying to locate a new normal. Do I need an entirely new set of friends? Do I have to never see Uncle Bob again? new set of friends? Do I have to never see Uncle Bob again? What is wrong with me in this scenario that I can't just integrate and accept the way things have become? It is sort of this low level,

for some people low level, for others much more heightened sense of discombobulation. It's a great word for it. It's the word of our age. I love that word. And I overused it. I've always overused it. It's a great word. I mean, it's fun to write. It's fun to say. I couldn't help but giggle when you said it because there's something very funny about it. It is. It has Bob in the middle of it. It's got Bob in the middle. That's kind of nice. Yeah. And I think I say in the book, for me, it creates this picture of all my limbs floating off in different directions and my head too. But I think this state of being is becoming quite

serious for us, actually, this very ungrounded, unanchored, unhomed state of being. And it's truly distressing to be in that state all the time. It's authentically distressing. It sounds so minor and so light that it actually is causing us deep, deep anxiety and deep, deep stress. And yet, I think that we are reluctant to really solve the roots of it because we've become very invested in being right rather than reintegrating with others. It's going to be hard to walk back from that sort of position, I think. You say, I sit at my desk to work, but instead I fidget between Twitter and Instagram and the news and Twitter and the news and Instagram and the news and Twitter and Instagram and Twitter

and Twitter and Instagram and the endless terrible news and Twitter again, where everyone is outraged at the news and everyone seems certain in one direction or another about what ought to be done. And that is, I am very, very familiar with that. You've been on Twitter once or twice. Yeah, a couple of times. And I know so many people who feel like, do I have adult onset ADHD? I can't even sit down to read a book anymore. I just feel like things have changed so much for me mentally. It requires so much work to focus on anything. to focus on anything. And so I distract myself from these uncomfortable feelings by creating constant senses of like newness and constant new stimuli of like, I'll look at this. I know this, I know this, and now this, and now this. So I don't actually have to do the work of sitting

down and focusing on something. And I feel a slight sense of temporary stress relief by not forcing myself to feel the uncomfortable feelings of like, you actually need to do your job or like clean the house or even just do something that I know is better for me. friend going for a walk, working on my knitting. We all know that this endless cycle of like the news and the Twitter and the Instagram and the news and the news and the news and the Twitter, we all know that's bad for us. Nobody is under any delusion of like, this is healthy and normal. But yet we almost feel like, but I can't stop myself. I need to like install apps on my phones to control my own behavior. You know what? I think I really began to get somewhere with that when I came to see that looping behavior in particular, that cycling between one app and another and then closing it down and opening the next one. And sometimes closing the app and opening it immediately afterwards, like as a complete impulse I began to to try and see that

as a symptom of anxiety in itself as like a signal rather than as a bad behavior like actually it was a it was a kind of sign sent to myself that I'm not okay and to to go towards the not okayness rather than the the app behavior which is kind of the surface presentation of actually a much deeper anxiety. And what's going on underneath that is this constant set of threat that has become ever present, but actually quite amorphous. You know, it's not something that we can look at. It is this sense that there is an existential threat forever on the horizon, but we can't see it. And life looks kind of normal. But every piece of media we're reading is telling us that it isn't. And our friends, when we talk to them, are telling us that it isn't. And our perception of the world is that there is this menace that we can't act on. And so we're living with this unspent kind of adrenaline all the time. We're ready. We're ready to take action on whatever it is this threat is. And we're not really sure what it is,

but it's really frightening us in a very genuine embodied way. And that just translates into the most useful thing seems like going and being angry on social media, going and being absolutely furious and expressing your rage. And the only time you receive any validation is when you do that, because then some people will come back to you and say, yes, right right on and I'm furious

too oh but wait here's another thing to be furious about and that that's the chain and to be clear all of these things are infuriating and and the world is full of awful things but never before have we had to live with this extent of contact with all the awful things in the world. And I genuinely don't think our brains are built to deal with this level of this globalized understanding. It's almost godlike, the overview we have now of all the terrible things in the world at once. And of course, we're totally helpless in the face of it most of the time. I think you're absolutely right that we were accustomed to dealing with tragedy on our own shores. Right? Like the Oh, it's the plague. Okay, that's going to be terrible. Half of you are going

to die. That's a huge tragedy. But we also at the time, we're not dealing with the tragedies of another community 5000 miles away. We didn't have the ability to communicate. Or if we did, it was like, send word to Lydia. And then it was like, it had to get on a ship. Six months later. Yeah. Yes, literally. It will be six months before we hear back.

And it all had to be written with a quill. You know what I mean? So like the words had to be worth it. And we only included what was really important to know. And again, this is not to minimize what was happening to a different community, but I think you're absolutely right that the human mind is not built to assimilate and react to every piece of tragedy that is happening around the world all at one time. And also for our reaction, that very response to be visible, that initial gut reaction where we say, that's horrifying, that's disgusting. It's there. It's there for everyone to see,

that's disgusting you know it's there it's there for everyone to see and it's there for everyone to see forever and you know what we're a lot of what we're arguing now is our horrified response you know like we've witnessed someone else's horrified response we're arguing about that response without actually even touching the people who are suffering, whose suffering has so horrified us and who we feel like we have to defend. And it's a toxic environment and it's a self-perpetuating toxic environment because we can argue forever about our wonky human responses of grief and horror that are not that were never designed for the outside world really but they're now suddenly shared we've got ourselves into quite the pickle I'd say but none of us are willing to let that go you know at the same time like we're clinging to the purity of that reaction. And we've, I think, really got to start thinking

about our part in this rather than other people's part in it. That's how it seems to me. This is only going to get addressed when we start looking inwards and saying, I can't control the whole world's behavior, but I actually can begin to modify mine a little bit. It's a great point, though, that we are now spending all of our time arguing about somebody else's response to a topic. Whatever that topic is. The moon exploded. Well, your response to how the moon exploded? Unacceptable.

We're now spending all kinds of time judging other people's responses to tragedy instead of actually responding to the tragedy or something more productive. It's now like, well, what did Catherine say about the moon exploding? Well, that's inappropriate. Can you believe what Catherine said about this horrific, we don't even have a moon anymore. And Catherine's over here eating a cheese sandwich. You know, like that is literally how I feel like our discourse, what we've devolved to. Do you know, this really gets to the heart of why I sat down to write Enchantment, because I think one of the first sentences I wrote in my notebook was, I'm so tired of dystopias. And to kind of unpack that, I felt like I was just through with hearing this endless discourse about how terrible the world is,

how unimprovable it is, how degraded, how we are in a sort of downward spiral. And anyone who speaks against that is either naive or a villain. And I'm weary of that. I'm weary of our giving up on our shared humanity. And I'm weary of the idea that there's any kind of ideological purity in us just giving up on humanity as like a project. You know, we're just terrible, we should go extinct. And at the same time, I think that the inverse of me being sick of dystopias is that I've really noticed this sense that if you talk about any kind of pleasure in the world, someone will pop up on Twitter or Instagram and scold you for taking pleasure while other people are suffering in, you know, whether it's in your own town or somewhere else. And the reason I wanted to

write Enchantment was I wanted to make a case for how we need these moments of connection and pleasure and rest and all of these softer emotions in order to survive this world. Like they are not in opposition to each other. It's not an either or. It's not like we can either have pleasure or people are suffering. It's like we have to take pleasure where we can because there is so much suffering in the world. And if we are rested and if we are grounded and if we've been allowed to settle ourselves, we can help the world better. We can go in and be better citizens and we can go in and be better friends and neighbours than if we are only obsessing all the time about the terrible things in the world. The world is actually 95% probably more wonderful, genuinely.

And that's what we need to integrate now more than anything else. That's the lesson that we need to learn about this, that the terrible violence, the terrible suffering is unusual in our species. For most of the time, we are ticking along with great kindness and generosity. But those acts are really invisible to us because we are alert to danger signals because we're animals. The subtitle of your book is Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. And I would love to hear you talk about what wonder means to you and how we can all go about awakening it in ourselves. Yeah, I got to play with all the Disney terms in this book, like wonder. For me, wonder is a really fundamental component of our understanding

of the world, actually. And it's this way of seeing that I think we can all access, but I think we almost train ourselves out of it after childhood. Like wonder comes so easily to children. They're drawn to things that they find fascinating and they get into these like almost reciprocal relationships with inanimate objects. You know, they'll pick up a stone in the garden and that stone will be the centre of their entire consciousness for often as long as you let them, you know.

entire consciousness for often as long as you let them you know and it's a very personal relationship with something with whatever it is so you can feel wonder at looking at the moon you can feel wonder at the shine in your shoes it doesn't matter what it is but it's this encounter with the world in a way that feels magical, in a way that makes you radically shift your perspective and suddenly come into contact with the vastness of the universe around us and the vastness of time and the impossibility of the life that we live, like how beautiful it is, how wonderful, how like that's that's that experience of wonder and most of us will experience it at least once in our lives but we often don't go looking for it you know and I think we often see it as none of our business or see it as something

that exists far away and we have to go on holiday and do something expensive to kind of access it. And the more I've kind of engaged with that topic, the more I've realised that you can find these little doses of it in everyday life. But you have to train yourself to pick up some signals that maybe feel quite distant and quite faint to you now, but which you probably had a training for looking for when your childhood. It's a lovely topic to write on, particularly in a world that feels so grumpy. Yes. I love this idea that we have an innate ability to experience it because we experience it regularly as children. And in some ways, perhaps when our brains begin to be able to understand more theoretical ideas and, you know, as we get older and we can suddenly make sense of algebra. Some of us can make sense of algebra.

Yeah, some people can. Some of us. Yeah. This idea of like, it's really cool to experience the majesty of a waterfall. There's not a lot of social capital and being like, oh my gosh, look at this incredible waterfall. You know what I mean? People make fun of you for it.

It almost gets beaten out of us by our peers and by society. But I absolutely love the idea that it's still there. And you talk about this in the book. It's just there waiting for us to return to it. It never leaves us. And we just need to allow ourselves to tune into it. And we can practice tuning into it. It's not an either or light switch type situation. We can practice tuning into it. switch type situation, we can practice tuning into it. And I also love that different things can bring wonder to different people. It doesn't all have to be the same thing. We don't all have to be like, look at this mossy rock. For some of us, that would be super great. I love a good mossy

rock. I love a mossy rock. Yeah. I love a good mossy rock. But for other people, that's like, that is slimy. Get that out of here. I don't want your slimy rocks. But that's the beauty of it is they can have something different that they think is absolutely wonderful. How do we practice finding wonder so that we can begin to potentially experience less anxiety? And we're not talking about clinical anxiety. We're not talking about medical diagnoses. This is not a substitute for speaking to a qualified therapist. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the discombobulation that people really are just experiencing as an everyday state. How do we begin to tap into that sense of wonder

again? Yeah, I mean, the question I ask myself quite often is how can I ground myself in this moment? You know, I don't have to achieve something that's going to solve all my problems forever, but I can make a connection with something that I find wonderful, that's going to settle me for long enough to survive this moment, which is sometimes the bit that feels challenging. make a connection with something that I find wonderful, that's going to settle me for long enough to survive this moment, which is sometimes the bit that feels challenging. And I think one of the things that we can all do is begin to gradually, slowly coax back an engagement with our own fascination. And for some of us, that's going to feel really far away, right?

Because we've deliberately put it aside as we've grown up and we've been told that it's immature to do that and we mustn't do that. So we do have to show this some patience. But I think one of the things that you can do at the beginning is to start to reconnect with the things you found fascinating as a child. So did you love looking at the moon? So as I write in enchantment, I was a big stone collector when I was a kid. And I had these little boxes of specimens. And I like to line them up and learn everything about them and name them. And so for me still, I mean, I'm sitting at my desk here and it's surrounded by stones. And I have them, I'm going to pick up one now, have them so that I can just just hold

one sometimes and you know I'm not talking about the kind of wonder here that's like oh my god I was out for a walk and an eagle literally landed in front of me and spread its wings and looked me dead in the eye and then flew off again like that that's amazing but that's rare and you're not in control of that but what I am put in control of is engaging very deliberately and very carefully with something that I know I find interesting and beautiful and kind of grand I mean I I love the weight of a stone in my hand and I love the way that if I sit with it for a while it will warm in my hands I love how much character a stone has got. And some people hearing that will not relate to that at all. They're like, stones haven't got characters, they're just little bits of rock. Fine, stones aren't for you. Great. Go and look at the moon,

go and look at the stars. Go and watch birds in flight. Go and watch the clouds change above you. Go and watch some water. Drink a glass of water. I mean, that can be like a really incredible experience if you give it a moment. But what we're talking about is focus and attention and spending a few moments paying close attention to something that you find beautiful and interesting. And it doesn't have to be grand. But if you practice it, if you show it some patience, then go back to it repeatedly, every time you need it, that relationship

will only deepen. And it's like building a muscle. That wonder will come to you so much more easily, quite quickly. I know some people who keep little notebooks of things that bring them delight, where they're like, that homemade ice cream cone that I had was just absolutely delightful. It had so much delicious flavor, and I want to remember it. down by hand and then revisiting that list can also, I feel like, help flex that muscle, strengthen that neural pathway in our minds of like, here are things that have brought me just like a little moment of joy or pleasure or wonder. And it doesn't, again, like you're saying, you'd love the feel of a rock in your hand and the way that it feels warm. And other people might just be so fascinated with their sourdough starter. Oh, you've met my husband. It's a cool thing. It's wild yeast and it grows when I feed it.

That's weird. That's cool. I love it. I can tell you that I have developed a very strong sense of wonder with this little bulb garden that I have in my house. And I bought myself a little bulb garden subscription. And every month they send me this little potted thing of like tulip bulbs and they grow in my house. And I love watching them. These bulbs grow like an inch a day. And within like two weeks, they grow from like one inch tall to literally a foot tall.

And they just grow flowers. And all it takes is a little bit of water and they just do it without my input. And this thing has just brought me an incredible amount of delight. And I've just wondered at these little things that just exist and have the purpose of bringing more beauty into the world. And I just find it magical. And it is. And you know what's, I mean, I have my potted plants around my desk as well, as well as my stones.

And I have to, I've been corrected so many times by my publicist that in England, we call them pot plants, but apparently I mustn't tell any more Americans that I have pot plants growing around my windowsill because they would take it as something very, very different. That's marijuana. Yes, that's right.

Yeah. So I am not growing drugs on my windowsill, but I am growing some very beautiful plants. And it's a moment of engagement. But I think what's interesting is that we often set up wonder as something that's almost in opposition to a scientific understanding of the world. And like we almost have to choose between this fluid spiritual relationship where we go, wow, it's kind of magical when a plant grows, isn't it? And between understanding it scientifically. But I find that often understanding the science

behind why that plant's growing, it fills me with the same amount of wonder as not knowing, as just seeing it as this process that happens. Like it's incredible that a plant fundamentally grows from air and is plumped up by water. It eats the sunshine? It eats sunshine. And it's drawing stuff from the air that I can't even explain it. I'm going to be bad at it. But I could go on engaging with that for the rest of my life in order to truly understand it. And it

increases my sense of wonder every time. It does not become mundane to me just because I understand it. It becomes all the more incredible. How does this whole world fit itself together in such an elegant way? And I can see the evidence of that right in front of me sitting around my desk while I work. And I can see it through the little skylight window that's in front of me where this morning I sat down and the moon was right there. I'm looking out into space. How do we keep forgetting how wonderful that is? It's extraordinary, but also very ordinary. Absolutely. I, I totally agree with you that understanding something scientifically only enhances my sense of wonder about it. Like

you mean to tell me it eats the sunshine and then it's like delicious and then it grows like that is makes no sense and yet it makes all the sense and i feel the same way about space i'm not very like physics is not my brain is like nope don't get it but yet i also find it incredibly wonderful to be like here's a picture in this picture are 10 000 other galaxies oh that picture and i'm like i don't i do not understand it but it's really really cool there's you know what a lot of a lot of wonder is or in particular the emotion or which daca keltner writes about so well is the experience of radically understanding our smallness in the universe and that kind of big shift that happens when we realise how big the rest of the universe is

and how we are. We're not even a speck in it. Like we're not even that relevant. And as a child, I found that idea incredibly difficult to deal with, like this idea that space might be infinite, this idea that the times be infinite, this idea that the time scales and the size and the way that they're conflated is impossible to get your mind around. And I felt very intimidated by that. But as I've got older, I find that a relief, like how much that lifts

from me to know just how insignificant I am. And my stone tells me the same thing, incidentally, because, you know, I've only got to think about the time scale over which that stone was made to know what a tiny speck I am, even in the history of this planet. And to radically shift into that, alleviate so much of my angst. I don't matter. I don't matter in the scale of things. Even if I achieved incredible success in this lifetime, over the scale of the universe and over the scale of time, it's so insignificant. It's vanishingly small. And so we can breathe out, you know? It's okay. It's okay.

What I take away from that when I am, you know, confronted with the vastness of the universe is that the weight of the world is not on my shoulders. And it doesn't mean, again, turn a blind eye to suffering, don't care about your neighbors, don't seek to improve the world, doesn't mean any of those things. But the idea that when I understand how small I am, I realize how much the universe is actually not depending on me to be on Twitter. To scold people on Twitter. Yeah. To tell them they're exhibiting grief incorrectly that the universe in its vastness and ancientness is actually not at all depending on me to post five tips for marketing on instagram you know what i mean yeah that's. And yeah, and what's really interesting about that is when you start taking yourself back into scale, seeing yourself at scale, what you do realise is that you could knock on the door of your neighbour down the road and make a genuine, a genuine tangible difference at the correct scale of things.

And that that would matter. That would genuinely matter. We've become almost dysmorphic in our understanding of our size related to everything else. And we need to find ways to step back into scale again, I think. That's a great way to say that. That when we put ourselves in scale, we absolutely can make a difference. My ability to affect the happen, the scale of my world, my next door neighbor who had a house fire or the child at my child's school who doesn't have any school supplies

because their parent is in jail. And that's a problem that I can remedy and I can alleviate that child's humiliation at not having the right school items. When I put myself back into scale, I can make an enormous difference. But if I'm always trying to make a difference in a galaxy beyond my own, I will never feel anything but angst. Absolutely. You cannot feel settled with that on your shoulders and you know what i'd go even smaller than that i can make eye contact and smile at the person serving me at the at the checkout at the supermarket and say hi how are you rather than staring at my phone arguing with someone on twitter that doesn't care what i say anyway. Like, I'm not even helping them.

I'm just being human with them. I'm just interacting. I'm just making contact on a basic level. Like, that has a real impact on not just someone's day, but on how we start to function again. We've dug ourselves into a hole, but we can for sure dig ourselves out of it. But we have to bring it back to us and not how

everybody else needs to change. It's a huge lesson to learn, isn't it? I love it. I just love it so much. You say in your book, we who so often think we're cultureless can unpack a galaxy of stories from one garden weed. But the time has come for us to understand what these stories mean to us and to reconnect with the other stories too, which are all waiting for us in our

gardens and surging up from the cracks in the pavement. And we must tell them to our children so that they can't imagine living without them. Telling them is an act of belonging, a way of pushing tap roots deep into the ground. And you say in a world full of restless and displaced people, it's an act of welcome too. And I just loved your book. I felt very seen and it felt very comforting to me. And I love what you have to say about putting ourselves in scale in the universe. And I wonder if we can wrap this up by

you sharing a few things that you find particularly wonderful. Don't wind me up and let me go because I'll go I'm a water baby and I didn't grow up by the sea but in my 20s I realized I really had to because for me the sea is like a magical being I can't see it as inanimate I can't possibly think of it as that way it feels to me like this creature that I can go and walk down to every day and watch its mood and think about how vast it is again like it does that scale stuff in my head again like just watching the tide come in every day in and out twice a day and thinking about the volume of water that that represents I can't fathom it and yet it unfolds in front of my eyes twice a day and I feel wonder every time

I go and see the sea and this morning I noticed out of my window that the moon was setting over the sea and I'm kind of about three blocks down So I pulled on my clothes and went running down to watch it finally set over the horizon. And it was magical. It took me 10 minutes. It was not a problem. I know I live near the sea, but I also took the time to notice it. I really think that anyone that's sitting there thinking, well, isn't she lucky that she got to see the sea? Take a little breath and think about the thing that you could do. I mean, I quite often just step outside at night and look up at the moon and the stars. It's so simple. I'm not trying to interpret anything from them. It's just a lovely thing. It's a lovely point of

contact with my scale in the universe and with my feet on the ground. And it takes a minute. And the sky is definitely free and definitely something that I am allowed to go and see. And I can, and I do because I make that decision. And I get it that we are bombarded in this world with expensive fixes that on one hand are so costly that we don't know how we can afford them, but at the same time completely over-promise what they can do for us and claim they're going to solve everything and I we need to train ourselves to be attracted to the opposite which is the free mundane everyday thing that makes stuff a little bit better and that's enough. That's often all we can have and it still moves the needle a really significant amount. I love this. I loved being able to chat with you. I really loved reading

Enchantment and I'm just really grateful for your work and grateful for your time today. Thank you for being here, Catherine. Oh, thank you. It's been such a lovely conversation. You can buy Catherine May's book Enchantment wherever you buy your books. And if you want to support local bookstores, you can order from bookshop.org. I'll see you again soon. The show is hosted and executive produced by me, Sharon McMahon. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.

And if you could leave us a review or share this episode on social media, those things help podcasters out so much. Thanks for being here today.