Katherine May:
It’s not intimidating at all.

Martha Beck:
Here’s my plan. This is how it serves my narcissism. I’m just going to take over completely, but I also serve myself by reading your words, which are much better than mine could be.

Katherine May:
That’s not true at all.

Martha Beck:
First of all, I just want this to be a conversation. Usually I jabber for a few minutes, and then we take questions, but today we’re in a different format, and I would love to just talk to you, Katherine. Is that what you go by, Katherine?

Katherine May:
Yeah, I’m a Katherine. I go for the full length of the name.

Martha Beck:
The full name, Katherine the Great. The first book of yours that I read was “The Electricity of Every Living Thing.” Is that what it’s called?

Katherine May:
That’s what it’s called. It once got called, in a British magazine, “The Electricity of Every Loving Thing,” which made it sound a bit like a sex toy catalog.

Martha Beck:
There’s a whole branding line you could go into.

Katherine May:
I could go into another business.

Martha Beck:
The book we’re telling you to get here is “Enchantment,” but you must also get “The Electricity of Every Living Thing,” which is about Katherine taking a very multi-layered walk through the English countryside, a long walk, and also discovering things about herself in midlife that were quite surprising. Do you mind introducing yourself this way, just because that’s how I met you?

Katherine May:
Sure. Yeah, absolutely, it’s the backstory. I learned when I was 39 that I was autistic, and I did it by going on a long walk. Without the walk I would never have realized, because I needed that time to process so many stories I’d been telling myself, and to clear the way, and to make space for that new information to come through.

How old am I now? I’m coming up to 46, so I’ve known that for seven years. I can’t explain the extraordinary, life-changing power of learning that about yourself when you’ve not known what you are for your entire life.

Martha Beck:
Of course, there’s a huge spectrum, and there are people who have very severe disability based on this. As you say in that book, “Nobody would’ve guessed.” I read it, I was just like, “Oh.” I went online, I took the test, I turned out mildly autistic.

Katherine May:
Okay, welcome.

Martha Beck:
When you took the test, you thought it would be mild, and it was actually quite pronounced?

Katherine May:
Yeah, and in fact, the thing about it nobody would’ve guessed was really more because nobody thought that girls were autistic at the time at all. All the very clear signs were there throughout my childhood. I exhibited some really classic signs of autism. I stopped talking for a year, when I was three. I had severe sensory problems. I had all of the mental health problems that come with being autistic. It was all absolutely there, but the information just wasn’t available. When I got my diagnosis, my mom said, “I knew there was something.”

Martha Beck:
Right. It explained my whole family to me. It relates to this book, because when you say “The Electricity of Every Living Thing,” that is not metaphorical. Is that correct, that you actually can feel a charge when you touch things?

Katherine May:
Yeah, everything comes with a current.

Martha Beck:
Right, everything alive is powered by electricity. What does it feel like to you?

Katherine May:
It depends. It’s a good barometer for how I feel about it, as well. If it’s a thing that I like, the electricity can feel very friendly, a lovely tingle, or a gorgeous, flowing circuit. If it’s something I’m less keen on, it can feel a lot like an electric shock.

A good example is, I hate being touched by someone I don’t know, and with no warning. If that happens to me, I can feel it burning on my skin for several hours afterwards, there’s an imprint left. Of course, if you’re in a crowd, that’s happening permanently.

Martha Beck:
One of the reasons I’m prying like this is that I think that the audience for The Gathering Room, I said a couple of weeks ago that I think if we all took the test for, “Are you a highly sensitive person?” all our computers would explode. I tend toward that myself, and I think the people who are interested in what I’m interested in are also that way.

You go in this book into the uses of enchantment, that’s the title of another book, but it’s called “Enchantment Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age.” The two things that I’ve been hearing from the audience of The Gathering Room over and over and over is, the questions are freighted and loaded with fear, anxiety, and overwhelm, and you speak to that so beautifully, but knowing that you’re extremely sensitive because I think there’s a vague and fuzzy line between a highly sensitive person and an autistic person often?

Katherine May:
I’m not sure there even is a line, to be honest. I think it’s just different people preferring different language quite often.

Martha Beck:
That comes with its own interesting abilities, and its own torments, but it also comes, I believe, with a dose of enchantment, with a tendency toward the mystery and the magic of the natural world in particular. By magic, I simply mean that which we do not understand.

Katherine May:
The feeling of something being magnetically fascinating as well, I think.

Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah.

Katherine May:
When you’re thinking about magic.

Martha Beck:
And in this book, you go into the hierophany, is that the word?

Katherine May:
Yeah, hierophany.

Martha Beck:
Talk a bit about that, because I found that really compelling and I think the audience will too.

Katherine May:
So hierophant is a term coined by Mircea Eliade to basically describe these incursions of the sacred into the everyday world. So they’re these objects or places which we imbue with sacred meaning. And for the person that understands them, they know it might not be readable to everybody, but for the person that understands them, they unpack layers and layers of sacred meaning and sacred feeling.

And I wanted to think about what our hierophants are, because then they’re no longer the traditional hierophants is that we were maybe given when we were growing up, the churches or these places that we were told were sacred, but maybe didn’t always key so well with us. But I think that we are beginning to create new hierophants now, and I think we urgently need to actually.

Martha Beck:
Desperately. I love you talking about just the weight of a stone in your hand and the sacredness of its trying to return to the Earth to gravity. So this book goes through the elements, water, fire, and air, I believe in that order?

Katherine May:
I always have to think really hard about it.

Martha Beck:
And it’s about going from the anxiety that so many Gathering Room people are always talking about into enchantment and almost using the susceptibility to fear and anxiety and burnout, which is a really key component of this book. Using that as a way to establish hierophany’s in our everyday lives and through connection with whatever parts of nature we can find.

Usually we start The Gathering Room with a little meditation. I would love to do it at the end and see how it feels to you, because I did it once and then everybody, I could feel it. I feel if people are responding to me on the computer, I feel it as an electrical force. And it is a way that energies join on this particular broadcast sometimes. So I’d love to do that later, but I really want to trace with a few quotes that I’m going to read myself because I just want to steal them from you. They’re so good.

Katherine May:
Take them.

Martha Beck:
Some anxiety and burnout into a place of art, enchantment, magic, and nature, which is actually, I’m writing a book that’s about anxiety and how it’s on the left side of the brain and you have to go into the mystery on the right side. And so I’ve taking a sort of neurological sociological approach to it.

But Katherine’s is poetic and in being poetic, it is itself. This book is itself a hierophany for sure. And some of her prose is so beautiful that I’m just going to read it. So first she talks about the burnout and fear of our incredible, painful, I got the wrong quote.

So there’s something in the book about this, the intense fearfulness of our age. Could you just talk to us about that?

Katherine May:
Yeah. I kind of compare us to rabbits in this time in our life.

Martha Beck:
That’s it. So many predators.

Katherine May:
Yeah, that we’ve been running like rabbits. And rabbits have this white tail that flashes to signal the next person to run behind them. And we’ve got stuck in this cycle of signaling fear. And we do that over the internet all the time endlessly. And each one of us is picking this fear up and passing the fear onto the next person. And I said, “We’re in the business of running now. We’re just constantly running away from this world that seems so terrifying to us right now.”

Martha Beck:
And that actually is, it’s an interesting neurological phenomenon where when you get stuck in a certain part of the brain, it just escalates anxiety without ever bringing it down. And so it is like we’re continuously surrounded by predators and having a flight response, and it never goes away.

Now in, The Electricity of Every Living Thing, didn’t you say that a hundred years ago, even if you were born with autism, there wouldn’t be this level of clamor, there wouldn’t be this level of constant barrage of information and sensation and intensity? Do you think that adds to the anxiety?

Katherine May:
I really do. I begin to think that we’re living in a kind of neuro hostile age almost.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Katherine May:
The level of input we’re receiving all the time is so great and so innovating, and even when we’re enjoying it’s tiring us. And you know what? Autistic people like me are the pit canaries in this. We’re the early signal, that it’s got too uncomfortable because I now think that the neurotypical world is really understanding what we’ve been talking about for a long time, which is that contemporary life is unbearable.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Katherine May:
And people are exhausted, not because they’ve been doing anything wrong or necessarily even overworking or burning the candle at both ends. They’re exhausted because they’re constantly processing so many inputs and it’s so noisy. And one of those inputs is fear, which is absolutely exhausting. And it never gets spent out either. So our bodies are primed for this event that never quite happens. It’s embassy deferred and it’s toxic to us, I think.

Martha Beck:
I think so. And it consumes us. And that’s what I did bring here is a quotation about how that burns you out over time. So Katherine writes, “I know that I am on first name terms with burning, with blazing high and burning out. Here I am back in that cycle of fuel, conflagration of scorched earth. The loss that it brings, the complete collapse of self is always agonizing. But there’s something I secretly like about it too. After all, the bare ground invites a new kindling to have nothing to lose, you first have to lose everything.”

So even though this fear is consuming us, when I read that, which comes later in the book, I thought, “Okay, it could be that we’re being set on fire for good reason?”

Katherine May:
Yeah. I interviewed Lama Rod Owens for my podcast a couple of months ago, and he crystallized that thought for me because I said, “This feels like the end times.” And he said, “It is. It’s the end of something and it’s of something that we all know is going wrong.” And he said, “The pain is letting it burn down and coming through into that next age.”

And he said, “There will be suffering from that. But we know as a community that we also want that era to pass and for a new one to come in.” And I think that really made a lot of sense to me because we’re feeling those flames. He described it as an apocalypse.

Martha Beck:
And I loved, for example, you also addressed in this book going during the pandemic to Zoom meetings that had to do with the consciousness of racial oppression.

Speaking of burning of the intense anxiety that that creates and the desire to go away from it. But then ultimately you started leaning into it and it was as though you were like, “Let’s burn this down. Let’s burn this down.” Only we can avoid it individually. But when we get together and we start to see the parameters of what we’ve done to each other, if we can sit in that, one Buddhist man I love says, “If we can sit in the falling apartness without polarizing, it creates the ground for something completely fresh.”

So I was thinking about how there are fire based eco systems. There are trees in California.

Katherine May:
Yes, absolutely, that require burning.

Martha Beck:
They have to be-

Katherine May:
Yeah, that’s right. And there are very traditional ways of life that involves burning the ground at the end of every season to make space for the new growth. In lots of ways I’m kind of comfortable with the burning. I’m comfortable with everything falling apart because it’s a release and it requires surrender. But of course it does require a kind of trust that there is another life after that.

And I think that’s what people really struggle with, that they have to endure the burning before they can see what the next life is. And that’s the terror, isn’t it? I think that we don’t trust life to make itself again. And of course it does.

Martha Beck:
And that’s interesting. That’s a more existential fear. It’s a deeper fear than all the clamor around us. But when we decide to turn away from the clamor and we start to feel ourselves burning, then there’s a deeper fear. But it seems to me to be a more authentic fear because the burning-

Katherine May:
Existential, isn’t it?

Martha Beck:
The burning of the ego.

Katherine May:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
And to me, there’s a deep spirituality in the way you talk about that, that is not at all religious, which really appeals to me and one of my favorite passages, all right, this one I have read to everyone I know because I’ve been meditating for years and years is wonderful. But I also had a bunch of children and I was a professor for a while. Like you I had to go through my degree program while I had three kids.

You write about meditating and how it would be great to be one of those amazing, heroic people who go off to a cave for 12 years. But you are also a working mother, a working parent.

And so here’s a long piece, but I’m going to read this because I just loved it so much,

“Few of the wise souls who have devoted years to contemplating the structure of the cosmos could tell us how to practice in circumstances like this, like the ones you are living in.

I want them to come and learn what I know too and what many other patient souls could share. I want them to experience the discipline of forever being pulled away from the interior, always feeling that the work of the mind and the body is just out of reach.

They would have to live through the exhaustion and the frustration and the isolation, and choose to wholeheartedly give care over and over again rather than walk away.

I want them to strive to attain the mental and physical discipline of getting out of bed in the middle of the night and still finding gentleness rather than fury. I want them to understand that they know nothing until they have endured endless spiritual deferment, the balm of contemplation forever at one remove.”

Katherine May:
Ah, I think that was one of my more rebellious.

Martha Beck:
But what you’re doing here is you’re burning patriarchy and you’re burning it for anyone who wants to be a participating caregiver because the whole economic structure takes us away from care and spiritual structures follow it.

Katherine May:
And the patriarchal structure no longer acknowledges how care is even going to take place. I think I grew up in an era when women were expected to stay home and give care, we’re no longer even expected to do that. We are now obliged it to for both members of a couple to work, because otherwise no one can afford to live.

And sorry, who is looking after the children or the elderly parents or the sick people? We haven’t got a plan. And yet we are endlessly told that those of us who are giving care and who go back and do it again and again are somehow, it’s spiritually and intellectually inadequate.

Wow, that’s a burning that really needs to happen. And that actually speaks to your point of a burning as a spiritual gateway. When we burn this down, we open up this space in which we can honor the fullness of our wisdom and existence and knowledge and be there with no shame. Take ourselves into that space and fully inhabit it. I get quite excited by the [inaudible 00:20:06].

Martha Beck:
Me too. Right now. We have in my most intimate circle, a two year old who’s going through a big tantrumy developmental stage and a beloved matriarch who is literally passing away right now, there’s a deathbed watch. And to take time away from all the stuff we’re supposed to do in this culture, all the stuff that is considered worthwhile, and to be there at those incredibly crucial moments of human caring is itself a burning.

And I think, what you were saying to me, to all of us out there who are resonating with this, is if you’ve been doing that, you’ve been doing spiritual practice. It doesn’t matter if you meditate, if you’ve been doing that, if you feed your cat every day, that’s spiritual practice.

Katherine May:
I’d go further. I’d say it’s spiritual leadership. What we show to our children when we bring gentleness to them instead of force is a sort of an opening a pathway for their future life too. And that’s exponential. That’s how we pass it on. Absolutely. It’s so vital and so undervalued.

Martha Beck:
So there’s that. And that’s brilliant in this, well, it’s brilliant in all your work, but there’s another way as well. There’s the burning of the spiritual leader who’s trying to exist in a materialistic society. But there’s also the mystery, the enchantment, the art that you bring in. And you talk about how your art sort of punched its way through your resistance.

And I just wanted, these are shorter, but you wrote, “Writing kept coming back to me, punching its way out of whatever grave I dug it. It loomed, insistent at my window. It rattled my door. I just couldn’t kill it. There was no silver bullet, no stake, no incantation that would slay it. Writing had plans for me and my resistance was futile.”

I know there are people out there just taking a huge deep breath because something’s got plans for them too, for all of us.

Katherine May:
It speaks really strongly to your work. I think that’s it. But it is this sense of I was denying my integrity there completely. I was deliberately trying to squash down the thing that I knew was my absolute life’s mission. And I thought it was silly and embarrassing and not a good enough goal, not a certain enough goal, not a serious enough goal. And I did everything I could to not be a writer for the longest time. And then by the time I realized that I had to be a writer, I’d got really bad at writing.

I hadn’t taken care of it. I’d been a good writer as a child, but that did not convert into me being a good writer as an adult once I’d taken 10 years off of it. And so I had to absolutely learn to fail at being a writer before I became a decent one.

Martha Beck:
Can I read one more quote and then I want to talk more about this? I’ve been going through this because when I, in my own research, realized I needed to go into my right brain I tried to reclaim my own childhood art, which was visual, drawing and painting. So I’ve been doing, and I had much the same experience. And this paragraph, whatever it is you do. Last week I talked about how the new neurological research shows that participating in the arts, whatever your art is, changes your brain in ways that are very felicitous, very healthy, and your whole biochemistry changes. But this is what it takes to do that in a culture that does not value it.

Katherine writes, “The skills of deep play,” which is where art comes out, “took far longer to learn than anything I’d studied before. They meant asserting the awkward right to time, space, and solitude, making a shameful claim on my own creativity.

They meant learning to trust my long forgotten gut instinct and to feel a yearning for my own work. They meant putting aside time to do things that seemed pointless to the outside world. They meant confronting my stultifying terror of failure and learning to enjoy eviscerating mediocre mistake ridden work. It was long and slow and uncertain and quite often boring.”

And then you say, “It was all worth it.” And let me tell you to read Katherine May on the page is to feel a really fully gratitude that she did this, that you did this. Thank you, Katherine.

Katherine May:
I couldn’t not.

Martha Beck:
You couldn’t not. You couldn’t not. And yet you’ve been so brave and so persistent, and you have such a high standard, not only for your art, but for the soul of it and for the magic of it.

Katherine May:
Yeah, absolutely.

Martha Beck:
And I know that everyone out there listening to this is starving for that. I think the world is starving for it.

Katherine May:
The people that talk to me about their writing, nine times out of 10 say to me, the question comes down to, “Am I actually allowed to do this?” And that can get phrased in loads of different ways. It can be, “Why are you allowed to do this?”

Or it can be, “How do I make the time?” Or it can be, “When do I do?” And all of those questions are basically the same thing, which is, “Am I entitled to this thing that drives me?” And the answer was always like, “Yes, right now. Right now is the time that you do it.” And also you’ve got to be ready for it to take a long time. But you start that commitment right away and it will be painful.

I think that’s the dark side of having a practice like this, is that you have to go in and it is like going into the deepest, most painful therapy because you will confront every difficult part of yourself in the process of making the work that you are desperate to make. And you have to go in facing that uncertainty of the new life as well. And knowing that you might never become the thing that you are envisaging right now because you just don’t know where it’s going to lead you.

Martha Beck:
You don’t know.

Katherine May:
It would lead somewhere.

Martha Beck:
So ultimately, this is a book about faith, about fear and faith and about the transformation of the world through the transformation of individual human consciousness, which then extends itself in incredible artistic work like this book. And it becomes a shared possession that… I hang onto this book like an island that I’ve found in a long swim. Because when you read it is self-evidently true. That’s the thing about great poetry. And you are a poet, even though you write prose for this.

Katherine May:
I started as a poet.

Martha Beck:
And it lands in the soul and it is irrefutable. It just clicks into place. And your whole body and mind and spirit know it’s true. And that’s the state of integrity. You write from there and you challenge culture from there. And you challenge our everyday demons. And you find the angels, you find the hierophany’s everywhere, and show them to us.

Katherine May:
Thank you. That’s such a generous way of putting it. Thank you.

Martha Beck:
Your work is phenomenal. I just am so grateful for it. So now usually I can see people’s comments. I can’t see anybody out there right now, but I still want to do a final meditation and just introduce you to this one, Katherine. And it comes from a neurologist at Princeton, but it’s an odd exercise that they show puts the brain into a really interesting space. And speaking of space, that’s what it focuses on.

Most of our physical matter is made up of space. So your atoms are full of space, and if you turn your attention from the matter in you to the space and from the sound to the silence and from the motion to the stillness, it shifts the brain. So this is how I lead the meditation.

You have to start with a question. And the question is, “Can I imagine the space in the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the space in the tissue inside my chest? Can I imagine the silence beneath everything I’m hearing? Can I imagine the stillness that holds everything that’s moving?”

Katherine May:
Oh.

Martha Beck:
That changes my electricity when we do this meditation. And thank you for participating in it. It is a way onto holy ground. And another way onto holy ground, all of you, is Katherine May’s work.

I just want to thank you one more time and say, please keep writing. We need you. The world needs you.

Katherine May:
Thank you so much.

Martha Beck:
It’s such an honor to have welcomed you here on The Gathering Room. I hope we meet again soon.

Katherine May:
It’s an absolute honor to be here. Thank you so much. I’m so grateful.

Martha Beck:
Thank you, Katherine. Bye everybody. See you next week on The Gathering Room. Bye.