Cultivating Awe
Keely Adler and
Cultivating Awe
When people or groups become too enamored with mountaintops, we should ask ourselves whether their euphoria comes from love or from the experience of supremacy.
Cole Arthur Riley • This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
awe is more than an individual experience. As Keltner suggests, awe can mobilize us toward social progress. It can help us address the systemic shocks that have made our reality so weird. In fact, awe may be the key to solving the polycrisis
🏡 Shock and Awe
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
I think awe is an exercise, both a doing and a being. It is a spiritual muscle of our humanity that we can only keep from atrophying if we exercise it habitually.
Cole Arthur Riley • This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
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.
