[a day]

The river is roaring in this deep-cut canyon, orange lichen spots pasted on the rocks. Some boulders bright and unmarred, as if just recently cracking off the five-hundred to a thousand foot cliff on either side. The water is rising. spring is cascading on my left. This particular place, where I stand, where I walk, by the water, is the confluence of three creeks: middle, north, and ruby anthracite creeks.

Now, in the evening hours, as the sun just dipped behind the cliff wall in front but still illuminates up behind me, and the blue sky has only two white clouds overhead, the water makes powerful, immersive, totally encapsulating song. The heat of the day has caused increased snowmelt, a delayed reaction meaning that it will be a while before the waters lower again, in the dark and cool of night.

In this moment, as I look at this five-foot diameter cottonwood tree extending upwards, the verticality brings me into the depth of awe and wonder. Perhaps more than anything, knowing myself through the mirror of awe and wonder provided by nature has been and is ongoingly one of the most beautiful parts of my life. That, and my deeply moving relationship with Colleen, our fur companions, and homelife.

The acoustics of this particular place changes every thirty or fifty or hundred feet. Now I am in a canopy, fifty feet lateral from the wild river, the powerful waters that have cut these rock stones and in so doing, lifted the walls.

I'm out here today to do some exploration and check on early season conditions. Ostensibly. I am also out here because, to go for a 25km hike just to see if the pass is clear of snow sounds like (and is/was) a really good time.

The temperature of the wind on my face, so cool by the water, is warm right now–-a testament to the desert not far away as the crow flew. I keep brushing myself against the lifeworld here, the soft animal skin of my body tickled all day by so many varieties of existence. Across the river, a perfectly shaped evergreen; the trail below me, equisetum, thimbleberry, wild raspberry, some kind of fir with green, sweet tips, and every so often even a dandelion.

There is a rock next to me, fallen from the sheer verticality above, the size of a school bus, cracked in the middle, but somehow, a single gesture of gravity. So much potential energy, now laying, becoming home to tree and lichen and moss–-a different kind of energy altogether.

I am so engrossed in the fullness of existence all around me, touched on so many levels, brought home to the expansion of my awareness. In a word, in awe, such that the nearly 17 miles pass in just a blink, and then I am driving home. Keltner (2023) defined awe thusly: "Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world" (p. 7).

The illumination of it all, cliffs, viriditas, mountains, blooming flowers, and the uncompromising sound of the river swallowing me whole, the lifeworld conspires to evoke such depth of awe.

[a different day]

Stunning. Powerful. Awe. That is what I feel in this moment. Sitting on this ridge looking north toward Mt. Sopris twenty miles away, the Crystal River valley before me in unfolding verticality of verdant life. Dao Moon wanders the ridge, smelling and looking for interesting fauna. I am sitting, tired from a few hours of physically strenuous maintenance work, taking a moment of pause to feel into this place, into me.

In the far, a cloudbank rolls in from the west, darkening the highest peaks in both the north and east. The sun shines in from below the clouds in this evening hour, and the west ridges cast long shadows deep into the valley and begins to call an end to this brilliant spring day.

There is a saying in wilderness rite of passage work: "the fasters bring the weather." If that is true, then I am forever indebted to all those ceremonial questers throughout deep time for doing the profound work of bringing magic to our lives. Clouds, sky, rain and snow together, wind launching the spruce and pine pollen upwards in cascading waves of green, and the Aspens swaying together as if in choir–-all this on a spring Colorado day; or two.

Magnificent awe. That is what I see in the weather, feel in its changes, know deep in my embodiedness as I walk this fine earth and get to know myself through the interactive aliveness of existence.

Quite truly, this is our birthright as humyn animals on this planet. NOT to turn the lifeworld into trinkets for distraction, a humyn hegemony of exploitation and linearity. Not that, though it can be difficult to see beyond the everyday pressures of existence in a competitive, consumer-driven economy.

No, our birthright is so much more, "so far beyond the rooftops of our knowing" (Harkin, 2020).

In a recent seminal book on the history and current empirical research on awe, Keltner (2023) situated this potent emotion within the larger processes of a humyn life:

Our birthright, that to which we innately and unquestionably belong, is the vast magnificence that is life on a vibrant and wild planet, spinning around a third generation star, hurtling through space in an expanding cosmos which is so unbelievably vast as to sweep past comprehension into liminality.

Our birthright, our unf***withable belongingness, is a bloom of conscious embodiedness in/with/on this tapestry of a million-million species emerging, interconnecting, dreaming, and dancing life together.

This is the reality beyond a transactional way of being given by the larger culture, and it is a free to you as breath. I find my way there when immersed in the wild landscapes because it is in those moments when I feel the permeability of my selfhood disintegrate into the existence all around me–-a transpersonal ecopsychological experience of awe.

Sometimes, I am the mountain.

Not all awe need happen in the vastness of the wilds of earth, everyday awe is just as essential (Keltner, 2023). Where do you feel awe? What calls to you, within or beyond the confines of the built world?  

References

Harkin, C. (2020). Susceptible to light. Soulfruit Publishing.

Keltner, D. (2023). Awe: The new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life. Penguin Books.