Awe: A moment where you’re stopped in your tracks and dare not move lest you disturb this trance of pure wonder and admiration at the immense perfection of it all. That’s a lot of words. You can’t really put the experience of being awe-struck into words, I guess, except maybe an exhaled “wow.”
I was looking at a list of positive emotions that’s pinned to my bulletin board when my eyes focused on the word “awe.” “Now there’s something I haven’t felt in a while,” I said to myself, licking my lips at the delicious memory of awe. I’d been so caught up in life’s drama that I forgot all about it.
So I pulled one of my favorite awe-invoking stories from the shelf where I keep it in my mind and paged through its richly illustrated pages.
The first thing I see as I open the story is vast and velvety star-studded space, like those pictures you see now and then from the Hubble telescope. All those nebula and everything, whirling in endless space.
Then I zoom in and find this one spiral galaxy and recognize it as the Milky Way, and it feels like home. Our sun is on one of its spirals. You can’t be sure which one because NASA itself says one thing on one page and another thing a few pages later. But it really doesn’t matter. Like the poet said, a rose is a rose . . . regardless of what you call it.
Anyway, somewhere on one of those sparkling arms is our sun, and there we are, on one of the planets dancing around it in its own little orbit, and oh look, it has a tiny little moon. And here we are, conscious beings, living on the surface of that planet that is so perfectly suited for life, and where life abounds on land, in the sea, in the air. And all the parts are related and interwoven with each other and necessary for each other in order for it all to exist.
And not only that! Have you ever read that description of how, if things had been different by only a little bit, it wouldn’t have been possible for the planet to support life, ever? Yet here we are.
On this planet dancing around a sun in the arm of spiral galaxy that’s one of many in a universe that just goes on and on.
And the specks of life that are human, in this little dancing atom of a world, can imagine all of that, and invent words like “awe” to describe how you feel when you think about that story.
I smiled and put the book back on its shelf. Awe was every bit as beautiful as I had remembered. You don’t have to have a complicated story to get to it. Anything that amazes you and makes you feel both big and small at once can put you there. A sunset. A baby. A concept. Music. A friend. A dog. A grain of sand. A tree.
It’s kind of neat how everybody gets to feel awe at one time or another. That in itself can push you into a little puddle of it. I like the way that awe puts me in touch with the mystery of it all, of our being here, wherever here is, capable of wonder, and despite all odds, alive.
Wishing you an awe-touched week, my friend.
Warmly,
Susan
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay