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Katherine May’s Enchantment offers magic moments to savour post-pandemic
Book review
“How do we worship now?” a “bone-tired” Katherine May wonders. Over the course of the pandemic she joins an online weekend retreat with the Zen Peacemaker Order, learns beekeeping, throws herself into sea swells, makes pilgrimages to standing stones and “healing” wells, hunts spectres on the Yorkshire moors and chases meteor showers – anything to summon the divine.
If her 2020 bestseller Wintering was about rest and retreat – coincidentally published just before the world shut down – Enchantment is a book for now, written in direct response to the pandemic. Essays are grouped into the four elements, Earth, Water, Fire and Air, each exploring those shaky steps coming out of our collective wintering (read: lockdowns) – those blinking, numb-limbed stumbles into existential limbo: “It feels as though we’ve undergone a halving, then a quartering, and now we are some kind of social rubble.”
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