Cultivating Awe
Keely Adler and
Cultivating Awe
If you want to know if you’ve forgotten how to marvel, try staring at something beautiful for five minutes and see where your mind goes.
Cole Arthur Riley • This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
The tragedy is that as we distance ourselves from the delight of our youth, we become increasingly prone to disillusionment. Wonder and beauty are not precise cures for disillusionment, but they certainly can stave off the despair of it. To reclaim the awe of our child-selves, to allow ourselves to be taken by the beauty of a thing, allows goodness
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The Sense of Wonder
goodreads.com
Rachel Carson's best known book is Silent Spring, but this book (originally an essay) is a personal favorite. She maintained a deep conviction that wonder has to be at the foundation of our relationship with wider world. This book is a demonstration of that belief, and a celebration of the expansive potential of curiosity and wonder. Her writing is a great reminder that with enough attention, adults can develop the 'clear eyed vision' that comes naturally to children, but fades over time if not kept alive.
We train our focus on beauty here or there—this poem, that architecture—because it is easier than bearing witness to our own story. We begin to gravitate not toward beauty but toward illusion. In this state, you are not approaching what you seek. You are running from your own face. But this is not the way of wonder. Wonder requires a person not to
... See moreCole Arthur Riley • This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
Children are made of awe. We have much to learn from them, but we seldom aim to. When we encounter the freedom of a child, we can choose to participate in their liberation or we can grow to resent the freedom in them.
Cole Arthur Riley • This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
Once again I find that I'm among the five or six people on a packed plane who care to look out the window at views unavailable to humankind for almost all of our history on earth
Walter Kirntwitter.com