Comfortable With Uncertainty: A Conversation with Katherine May
I'm deeply comfortable with uncertainty
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
Only a few pages into Katherine May’s hybrid memoir Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, I knew my life was forever changed. Not just by the glorious, lyrical, searing prose. Not just the ebullient humor. Not just the soaring affection for nature. But the curtain was drawn back, and here was the rarely glimpsed truth that while wintering is painful and lonely and not done by choice, it is also ordinary, inevitable, and not shameful. No one can remain in summer forever. And the current drive to do so is harmful.
Wintering to Katherine is a time when life falls fallow, forcing us to retreat and deeply care for ourselves. Illness, death of a loved one, job loss, end of a relationship, failure of a coveted dream, myriad things can beckon its arrival. Katherine has been through several winters of her own. In her first memoir The Electricity of Every Living Thing, she examines what it’s like to live with challenges that profoundly affected how she saw the world, how she interacted with the world, how the world interacted with her, what she wanted, what she needed, what she was able to achieve, and what she had to let go of.
It wasn’t until Katherine happened to hear a radio broadcast with an autistic woman that she recognized herself. She began seeking a diagnosis from doctors, a circuitous route which proved next to impossible. In the meantime, she took a variety of self-administered diagnostic tests, each time scoring much higher than expected. At last, a doctor weighed in: Katherine was autistic. While the news simply confirmed what she already knew it provided a fresh lens through which to understand herself. Rather than confusion and frustration, she could now wrap herself in compassion, clarity, and a fair dose of humor.
In Wintering Katherine investigates all sorts of ways wintering can manifest, not just those in her life—from the literal season of resplendent snow and cold to near death experiences, cold water swims, wolf trackers, sauna births, and so much more. It’s a magnificent book. Smart, curious, thoughtful, often hilarious, it offers a view of the world we need more of: that beauty and sorrow can coexist; that suffering and laughter can happen in the same moment; that fear and certainty are not at odds. It's a true celebration of being human.
Katherine lives in Whitstable, England. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times and Aeon, among others. She hosts the absolutely magical podcast The Wintering Sessions, which ranks in the top 1% worldwide.
We talked about chatting with mushrooms, shame, and the comfort of uncertainty. I wish I could play a track of all the laughter. Katherine May is quite jolly.
In The Electricity of Every Living Thing you talk about how you feel the electricity of those beings around you, including stones and trees and nature in general. Can you describe what this feels like?
I use the metaphor of electricity to think about the sheer intensity of every experience that I have: sound, touch sight. I'm very strongly affected by light, for example. It’s also the best analogy I can draw for how it feels to touch living people or when they touch me. It literally feels like an electric shock. Mostly, that's really unpleasant. It’s normal for people to touch you in everyday life: they might reach across and put a hand on your arm while they're talking to you, or they might bump up against you in a crowd. For me, that is not in any way neutral. I feel the burn of it on my skin for a long time afterwards.
But there's also another kind of intensity, which is the level of focus that autistic people have. When I have a relationship with a thing, and definitely living things, but as you say, also rocks, or just everyday objects that feel important or special or kind of meretricious of my attention, they have a kind of charge for me. Maybe magnetic is another way of talking about it, but there’s definitely a physical sensation of their presence: they feel alive. That makes it very hard to weed the garden, because I'm feeling the life of all those little things as I'm pulling them up.
We’re all composed of energy. In addition to the metaphor it does sound like you’re feeling the literal energy of everything. Does that ring true to you?