Along with many other pandemic survivors, May finds herself facing a glut of anxiety, alienation, lack of concentration, and other maladies as she struggles to regain some kind of normality. Looking back over her life, she traces the problem to the loss of the nurturing sense of wonder she felt as a child, noting that what used to have a timeless and absolute meaning available to all--“sacred places,” for instance—"are no longer given to us.” And as she details her effort to restore this lost enchantment—through means including meditation, swimming, forest bathing, and stories—her heartfelt and wholly relatable book becomes a welcome example of magical thinking in the best sense, and one filled with descriptions that are themselves literary magic, from a sea that’s “a quilt of wave crests” and the stones that “have a pure kind of weight to them, like small concentrations of gravity,” to the “delicate” stream water that “tastes of clarity.”
