Awe полностью

It begins with a story of awe about her twenty-month-old nephew, Roger, whom she would raise because of her sister’s early death. They wander down to the Atlantic Ocean one wild, stormy night. Getting soaked and risking colds, they laugh at the frothy waves, finding a “spine-tingling response to the vast, roaring ocean and the wild night around us.” Later, on a rain-drenched walk in Maine woods, Roger delights in the now spongy texture of the lichen on rocks: “getting down on chubby knees to feel it and running from one patch to another . . . with squeals of pleasure.” I bet they sounded like weee and wow amid longer periods of open-mouthed, wide-eyed silence.

Carson observes “that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.” She wishes that each child would live according to “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation of things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

How can we live a life of awe with young children? How can we do it by ourselves? First, Carson suggests, find awe and wonder in our senses. In simple, unfettered, slowed-down acts of looking. At clouds. Up at the sky. In listening to the natural world. The wind. There you will find, in Carson’s words, “living music,” “insects playing fiddles” in “insect orchestras.”

She, like Edmund Burke, suggests opening our minds to vastness. Here’s one way: trace an insect sound to its source. We can do the same for other systems of nature—thunder, waves, rain, the wind, a cloud, pine needles lying glistening on the ground, a bird call, the outlines of hills or mountains.

Distrust acts of labeling and classifying—the currency of the default self. Avoid reducing natural phenomena to words. Instead begin with mysteries. Where does an insect’s sound go? What is the mystery of a seed? Approach the natural world (and life) with this question: What if I had never seen this before?

Mysteries awaken us to systems. Look to the sky and listen for migrations of birds. Follow the tides. Watch the growth of a seedling and its relationship to the earth. Take in the ground of a forest, the humus, fungi, and tree roots, which we now know to be communicating via slow neurochemical signals, intertwined in ecosystems of collaborating species.

In these wonder-filled explorations, we encounter the epiphany that in “those who dwell . . . among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.” Carson ends this astonishing essay, written while she herself was battling cancer, by quoting oceanographer Otto Pettersson, a person of moral beauty for her. Pettersson made groundbreaking discoveries in the study of the biology of fish, tides, ocean depths, and large waves underneath the surface of the sea. Nearing his own death at ninety-two, Pettersson observed: “What will sustain me in my last moments is an infinite curiosity as to what is to follow.”

Death

Roshi Joan Halifax is a hero of twentieth- and twenty-first-century stories of awe. In her early twenties, she protested in the U.S. civil rights movement. For her PhD work, she studied the Indigenous Dogon people in Mali, and later the Huichol of Mexico, and witnessed how mystical awe is archived in story, ritual, ceremony, music, and visual design in Indigenous traditions thousands of years old. Frustrated with graduate school, though, in the 1960s she did what most alienated PhD students only think about doing: she bought a Volkswagen bus, took it on a ferry to North Africa, and drove by herself through villages and countryside, in search of a more communal spirit. Talk about an awe walk.

During her brief marriage to Stanislav Grof in the 1970s, she carried out some of the early experiments with LSD therapy. She collaborated with Joseph Campbell in his work on mythologies. Inspired by Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, she trained for years to become a roshi, or monk, very uncommon for a woman. Today Roshi Joan leads the Upaya Zen Center in New Mexico, which trains people in contemplative approaches to death.

Roshi Joan’s book Being with Dying tells the story of what she learned from more than four decades of this work, in particular with young men dying of AIDS. It is well chronicled how dying has been overmedicalized, moved into sterile, fluorescent-lit hospital rooms with machines and televisions and half-eaten trays of “food” nearby. The rituals, ceremonies, stories, music, song, touch, and contemplative practices that enable the dying and those they love through this transition do not make their way into hospital rooms—the antithesis of awe-based, intelligent design. Roshi Joan’s life work is to return us to the wonders of watching others die.