Summary of Enchantment By Katherine May:Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Enchantment By Katherine May:Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

 

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER

In Enchantment, May invites the reader to come with her on a journey to reawaken our innate sense of wonder and awe. With humor, candor, and warmth, she shares stories of her own struggles with work, family, and the aftereffects of pandemic, particularly feelings of overwhelm as the world rushes to reopen. Craving a different way to live, May begins to explore the restorative properties of the natural world, moving through the elements of earth, water, fire, and air and identifying the quiet traces of magic that can be found only when we look for them.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Mar 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215724316

Willie M. Joseph

Willie M. Joseph summaries get straight to the point and provide essential tools to help you be an informed reader in a busy world, whether you’re browsing for new discoveries, managing your to-read list for work or school, or simply deepening your knowledge. Available for nonfiction titles, these are the book summaries that are worth your time.  

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Stone

The narrator is feeling discombobulated, confused, disoriented, and out of sorts. They don't know what's wrong with them, but they feel strangely empty and devoid of thought and energy. Time itself is behaving strangely, clustering in certain dark corners and sparse elsewhere. Certain moments in their daily life have clustered together so that they are almost touching. They feel as though they have been standing at their sink in one continuous moment across several months, and they sometimes worry that they could skip through decades like this, standing in their bathroom, until they are suddenly old.

The narrator is experiencing a depression, but it does not feel like other depressions they have experienced. They theorise that it is a kind of pandemic hangover, with their wits dulled from too little stimulation and their sensitivities heightened by the lack of demand. They are far from alone in their experience of burnout, which is an incremental sickening that builds from exhaustion upon exhaustion, overwhelm upon overwhelm. Autistic people are intimate with burnout, particularly those who were not diagnosed until late into adulthood, and it is something that they carefully guard against. They blame the rigours of parenting through a pandemic while still trying to work, loneliness and isolation, the way it leads them to obsess over things beyond their control, and menopause and the way it fogs their minds.

They also experience the side effects of unemployment, debts, the inability to build a financial safety net, the loss of self-esteem, and shame. The narrator is unable to concentrate on their work due to the constant stream of news and social media. They decide to take a walk to Whitstable's standing stones, which were chiselled in the Neolithic period between four and seven thousand years ago. The stones guard an open space amid the new houses and apartments that have begun to creep into the surrounding fields as the town centre gentrifies. The boulders are a sign that we are changing, drifting away from the churches that once comforted fishermen and their anxious families and seeking somewhere neutral to gather our thoughts.

Jean Lowe, a woman who made standing stones, was commissioned to write about her work and was in her seventies by then, working in her studio by an old reed bed on a creek of the River Medway. She was happy for birds to bathe in them, but was adamant that they were not birdbaths. She loved the idea of her strange stones being installed in polite suburban gardens, bringing with them a hint of otherness. The most important details in this text are that Jean is a collector of stones, and that she is more of a collector than a maker. She believes that stones make themselves, and that they have a pure kind of weight to them, like small concentrations of