If I tried to describe to you the size of a cow’s head, you might not believe me. I thought of this while standing next to a small herd of Black Angus cattle grazing in a field. One cow was standing, looking at me with fast-ball-sized eyes, set into her great head that was around the length of a human torso, or perhaps a suitcase. There was thick mist in the air, and forest as backdrop. I was alone, content in the quiet, in the idyllic landscape of southern Ontario farmland. I found the cow beautiful. I was in awe, aware of how lucky I was to be standing near, in my human body, on the planet, witness to her perfection.
I grew up on a farm, so cattle are familiar, but familiarity is a thief. It can rob you of the ability to really see, to acknowledge the remarkable. When I thought of describing the cow’s head, I saw it afresh, without assumption, and that allowed the magic, the awe. “Awe,” is described as an emotion, but I feel that awe, like love, or terror, is in relationship with whatever the thing, be it cow, or cosmos . Awe is a divinely intimate experience; my efforts to describe the cow could never summon in you the same feeling of awe in me. “Awe is the feeling we get in the presence of something vast that challenges our understanding of the world,” according to Dacher Keltner who studied the subject. I get annoyed when academia latches onto quantifying foundational aspects of the human psyche, but the mystery of awe persists–it is not a problem to be solved. For that matter, science itself is worthy of awe. So, “Moo.”
Consider interactions: awe from the experience of having one of those rare, remarkable conversations as per John O'Donohue: “…a conversation which wasn’t just two intersecting monologues…in which you overheard yourself saying things that you never knew you knew, that you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you’d thought you had lost, and a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the two of you onto a different plane.” In my experience of this, again the mystery of it, I have been in awe. I’ve sensed a threshold between myself and the other, something sacred and energetic. Rumi addressed this in his poem, “The Night Air,” near the end: “ I know him from what I say and how I say it, because there’s a window open between us, mixing the night air of our beings.” I am in awe of Rumi himself, and his words written so perfectly back in the 13th century.
There is awe in the profundity of grief. I have pictures of my late father near me as I write. He died by suicide in 2004, the punctuation in a difficult, complex family dynamic that I have spent the better part of my life working to heal. I’ve healed so much, to the point where I sometimes forget about him. Then I look at his picture, and the love I found for him fills me again. There is awe in that love; to feel so deeply for someone who is gone, to have that grief is an example of the power of relationship, of ancestral ties, of our responsibility to each other. I am in awe of my two kids, humans that I made, that were not here, and then who arrived and are now out in the world. Mind-blowing.
At times, I have been in awe of the feeling of my heartbeat. The heart just continues on, beating, beating, beating, through my life toward my mortality. I am in awe of the mystery of death, more than any fear of it.
Are you not sometimes in awe of life? Of the simple act of breathing?
Awe is organic truth derived from pure essence. In Lindsey Stonebridge's book about Hannah Arendt, she writes, “Having a free mind in Arendt’s sense means turning away from dogma, political certainties, theoretical comfort zones, and satisfying ideologies. It means learning instead to cultivate the art of staying true to hazards, vulnerabilities, mysteries, and perplexities of reality, because ultimately that is our best chance of remaining human.” This openness is a gateway to authenticity, to the possibility of awe, because we stop sleepwalking. By having a free mind, being awake, we can see through the trappings or defences to the actual human across from us. We could consider the inevitability of their heartbeat. Awe of another brings us together unless, I suppose it is the terrible awe of a tyrant.
While camping in the Rockies the vision of a particular mountain stopped me, held me in its’ powerful spell as I stood and stared. That was awe. That there are mountains, that my father existed, that history is a thing, that we have imaginations, memories, dreams and desires, that we have free will, that we suffer tragedies, that we laugh, that loneliness can break us, that we experience anger, and that art can touch our souls; we are flawed, and I am in awe of all of that.
This is a difficult time on the planet, but there is still much to be in awe over. Consider that it is not the sun that rises, but the earth that bows. Remember that awe is organic truth; it is your rightful experience. You do yourself a disservice by succumbing to the draw of social media, and posting the cow photo instead of committing to the moment and the possibility of awe. It is freeing to not consider pulling out your phone. Your relationship to the world around you is your superpower, your gift. There is no platform for it other than your absolute presence. Awe will change you every time, sparked by a part of you that opens to the world, that craves it.