Sometime in the fifties, my father, by training an engineer, purchased me a small reflector telescope. I would go into the backyard of our southern home to look at the night sky. One night I searched for the Andromeda Galaxy and found that faint smudge of light. I remember clearly how I stepped back from the eyepiece, looked up and became aware of the immensity of the firmament, its astonishing depth. This wordless feeling was my first encounter with awe.
As someone raised in the flatlands, I remember my first sight of the Tetons from awakening at a family tent near Jenny Lake. The memory is so clear. We had arrived the day before and thick clouds obscured the mountains above their waist. In the morning the clouds had cleared and I wandered out to the shores of the lake and there it was- a stupendous rampart of rock rising incomprehensibly into the sky. I think this was my second experience.
I also remember the first time I ever saw the ocean. It was the Pacific. Family members, living in Portland, drove me over the Coast Range to Lincoln City where on an overlooking bluff I first saw the immensity of that water. Again there was a feeling of undiluted awe. Distant clouds on the horizon which I knew from experience to be enormous themselves were dwarfed by the scale of that ocean. That memory is also clear after all these decades and it was the last such.
I remember awe from my early days in the Midwest occasioned by seeing those really tall Oklahoma thunderheads towering fifty thousand feet or more into the air. The ones so high they had small crowns of altocirrus clouds. Again, grasping the scale, I felt awe.
It would be nice to relate that I've experienced these moments of awe frequently or even, if infrequently, at least up to the present. But it is not so. The moments diminished and came to an end. It was as almost as if being born into this place and learning it, the awe came to me as part of that learning, but ended when the lessons had been learned.
I would that I could start that learning over again if only to again truely appreciate this amazing place, and the awe that is the truest praise, the true wordless reaction of our shining eyes to this beautiful world.
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A related feeling is perhaps Wonder also initially wordless, but quickly progressing to speculation- a reaction to the interestingness of things we focus our attention on. I once wrote here of interestingness as being close to a transcendental property of Being. It makes good evolutionary biology sense that that be so. It leads to learning of the environment and survival. If nothing was interesting to us, we wouldn't have survived long as a species. It's unclear how Awe contributes to our Darwinian fitness. Maybe not everything in our mental world is a product of a million years of biological editing. That in itself is interesting.
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As I write this, I am sitting in front of a large picture window overlooking the Pacific ocean immediately in front of me and sixty feet below. Almost at my feet but extending out to the horizon now under a sky covered with grey clouds. This perch is not so far from the place where I first saw the ocean and experienced awe so many decades ago. That time, so distant now, was the last time I experienced it and as I write this I don't experience awe now. I have grown old.
But wonder has not gone away. Perhaps it has even grown stronger over the years as if to make up for that other loss. Like so many other writers I’ve read, I've learned that bigger is seldom better, that the large and awesome things in our world are no more remarkable than the small- that the pine needles when scrutinized are as interesting, as wondrous, as are the trees that shed them, as the billowing cloudscapes above the trees, as the vast sea glimpsed through breaks in the forest. The wonder abides in all of them equally.
As I write this, the waves are breaking in the tidal zone below. I think from the damp lines in the sand, the tide is advancing. As I age, I guess my own tide is receding back into some ocean of wonder whence it came but perhaps that is straining too hard at poetry.. is there something out there in waves and sky I am failing to see?
Why do I no longer experience awe?
Are wonder and interestingness then properties of Nature or of that human mind that observes itself in this transitory lodging, writing these transitory notes to this ever changing audience? Is there an audience? Small questions. The waves are indifferent.
The sea at springtime.
All day it rises and falls,
yes, it rises and falls. -Buson
As I sit here contemplating all this and the eternality that holds all these things of Mind and Nature- as I truly attempt to widen my comprehension to embrace it, it is just like that first time 70 years ago when I looked up at the night sky, and I now feel, though in my seniority, the return of a dawning awe. Awe of an Intelligence, not mine, so high, vast, and immense as to hold the star-filled sky, the ocean, the clouds, mountains, trees, pine needles and fleeting me in Its compassionate hand. What a wondrous thing- marvelous and superb! Emaho! ཨེ་མ་ཧོཿ
The space goes on. But the wet black brush tip drawn to a point, lifts away. -Gary Snyder
Who held the brush?
That sounds amazing Michael about the first time seeing a distant galaxy through a telescope. Similarly with the first time seeing a tall mountain range or the ocean with water that seems to go on forever.
A similar experience for me was driving over the Rockies from Vancouver to Calgary. I remember my wife and I simply staring out the car window and not being able to say anything. The scale and depth of those mountains stopped my mind from being able to form any words at the time. Awesomeness.
"They sea is so great, and my boat is so small". Breton fisherman's prayer
Your essay is awesome (had to do that) Michael! 👏 Such a tender cataloguing of the sense of awe and its inevitable waning with experience. Recognizing our smallness in the scheme of things is the beginning of wisdom. I find that my "amazement" (a variant of awe and wonder?) at the power and complexity of life (human and otherwise) grows sharper with age. I think my writing is largely an attempt to make some sense of it all.
Thanks for a beautiful reading experience with my Sunday morning coffee. 🙏🏻