Faber & Faber; 2023
ISBN: 978-0571378333
Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain
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This book’s author, Katherine May, is also the author of the beautiful and deeply haunting book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times which was a best-seller in 2020, and this new one is written in the same personal, self-disclosing style and with the same flair for beautiful, poetically expressive language.
May has produced, once again, a very personal and wonderfully readable account of her own inner experience of troubling life events. This time, she is describing, in intimate detail, how it felt to experience the Covid pandemic lockdown, and how it felt when lockdown was officially over. And as we know, the pandemic happened in a time that was already troubling enough, what with climate change, species extinction and the renewed threat of nuclear war. How does one navigate through these stormy waters as a mother with a young son? As she says: Even before a global pandemic arrived, we were 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 part that rings a particularly loud bell for me because it echoes the same experiences I have had in the past with my own children and grandchildren, is the one in which May speaks of her desire to inculcate in her young son the same feelings about the natural world that she has and her realization that he is seeing and experiencing totally different things – things all his own. There is no way she can gift him with the same sentiments and attitudes and pleasures that she herself had had at his age – or at any age. What he is seeing and feeling when he walks with her in wild places will be forever a mystery to her. She hasn’t – and will never have – any say in the matter and she is finally able to accept this. My son must make his own holy ground … Sacred places are no longer given to us, and they are rarely shared between whole communities. They are now containers for our own meaning. They don’t translate across minds.”
What finally emerges for May, after the rigors and restrictions of the lockdown, and despite the ever-growing and ever more grim problems our planet is experiencing, is the renewed sense of wonder and awe that she seeks as she embarks on various personal pilgrimages – to the mountains, to the moors, to a sacred well, into the sea – and sometimes finds, albeit not always in the ways or the places she expects to find it. As she says when she tells us about her experience of seeing her own shadow by moonlight – something she has never consciously witnessed before: Perhaps I’ve never found the right darkness before. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for it to unpack its meaning as it does for me here and now. I have gone looking for one thing and found another, not something rare and celestial and beyond my control but something that was always there… That’s what you find over and over again when you go looking: something else. An insight that surprises you. A connection that you would never have made. A new perspective.
Like Wintering, this book, structured in four sections that echo the primary elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water, is a deeply thoughtful, philosophical and autobiographical account of one highly sensitive and intelligent woman’s quest for meaning and for a Gaia-based faith that takes us from the everyday world of tasks and trivialities to a deeper world of meaning, connection and wonderment in which everything is OK just the way it is.