Katherine May

I will unashamedly say that difficult, complicated people can achieve great things if they’re allowed to create their own conditions, and if they’re allowed their time alone by the sea.

Mostly I am nobody when I wake up, just a consciousness in the darkness trying to piece it all together

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.

we sense a kind of absence. It is not so easy to articulate, but it carries its own dark middle-of-the-night fear, its own harrowing.
It’s the sense that we have become disconnected from meaning in a way that we don’t even know how to perceive. We sense it when we worry that we cannot stem the flow of our materialism. We sense it when the pull of our smartphones feels a lot like an addiction. We sense it when we realise that our lives are lived in the controlled climate of air conditioning, but we still don’t want to feel the weather outside.

Constantly surrounded by conversation, we are nevertheless chronically lonely.

The subtle magic of the world offers comfort, but I don’t know how to receive it.

I am like lightning seeking earth. Uneasy, I carry the prickle of potential energy in my limbs, ever deferred from the point of contact, the moment of release. Instead, it gathers in me, massing like a storm that never comes. I lack the language to even describe it, this vast unsettled sense that I am slipping over the glassy surface of things, afraid of what lurks beneath. I need a better way to walk through this life. I want to be enchanted again.

those
quiet traces of fascination that are found only when we look for them

The sudden catch of sunlight behind stained glass. The glint of gold in the silt of a stream. The words that whisper through the leaves.

That is what I am searching for: the chance to merge into the wild drift of the world, to feel overcome, to enter into its weft so completely that sometimes I can forget myself.