Awe-a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder.
I’ve recently been engaged in the lives of my nieces and nephews, on almost a daily basis, and it’s amazing to me how big the world is to them. How full every laugh is, how expressive every reaction is to something new and dynamic. Whether it be a joke, or a passing school bus, or a film, or an animal at a zoo, they take it in with this profound wonder. And the longer I am around them, I can almost feel it as they do. They provide a unique perspective I had never thought of. My youngest niece is two, and radiates the magic she sees everyday. Nothing is mundane, but a puzzle, an enigma, a riddle to ponder over a piece of cheese or a homemade cookie my mother smuggles to her in secret. I like to reach up and put her on high shelves to see the world from above and then, when she’s seen enough from her perch, leaps off into my arms, fully trusting a world surrounded by love, in her familial village. My oldest niece, walks down the stairs at 8 am, fully styled with a fearless aesthetic that conforms to nobody but her own, defiant, magical whims. Just the other day, my dad showed me this video of my youngest nephew giggling, as my dad asked him what kind of book he was reading. My nephew would not answer and just kept laughing until he finally delivered, after a perfectly timed pause, “A Notebook”. A dad joke extraordinaire. A kid that can bring the house down with an infectious smile and rise of an eyebrow. My eldest nephew is ten and has had type 1 diabetes since he was 3 years old, yet he is determined to live each day with an ‘attitude of gratitude’. He is more of a philosopher at that age, than I could ever be. He asks deep existential questions about God and suffering and feels the pain of others nearby, and carries it on his shoulders. He reads with a prodigious appetite, collecting threads of yarn, inspiring his own spin on pages of exponential imagination.
I remember when my grandfather came from Greece years ago. It was after my grandmother had passed. He had never left his mother country, and rarely left his little village home, navigating, from a child, the winding hills on the back of a loyal donkey, or his two worn feet. For him flying to Canada was this out of world experience. Every sight was from an unknown world. When we took him to Niagara Falls, he could not believe the size and the power of it. For him, it was as if all the water in the world had converged here to remind us of her power.
My father tells me stories of how much he loved the simple life he had in the mountains of Greece. He never looked down on the lack of material goods they had. Everything they needed was always within arms reach. This was a richness of a different kind. The mountain air, the closeness of his family, the freedom to explore the wild forests and ravines below. Six of them living in the tiniest little house, without electricity or running water. My dad would tell me, if he had to go take care of business, his mother would walk him into the bush and while he was squatting behind a tree, she would point to the stars and tell stories written in the night sky. She would tell him of the huge fish in the sea, describing them even though she had never left the village. She would trace them with her weathered hands, under the glow of a candle as the universe lit up, framed by the surrounding mountains. When my father tells me these stories, I can feel the love, feel the reverence of him looking up at these moving portraits of blissful innocence and holy discovery.
I lost this aweness early on in life. I don’t know when exactly. When I began to take the world for granted or seeing it as simply a ‘given’. It’s sad when you think of it. When the world around you becomes something to navigate, something to endure, something to contort, to align with an inner perspective that gives credence to a distorted, fearful reality. Swirling thoughts blinding us from Nature’s muses, that captivate younger eyes. A robin perched on a stop sign could not tear me away from the traffic jam behind my eyes. This beautiful miracle, a statistical anomaly, bringing that little flying alien mere feet from me. A little feathered organism, in its own universe, mitigating the obstacles that pepper her journey to create and continue life, before its own expires. “hopefully it doesn’t crap on me and ruin my day”….if only it would.
As I’ve ventured into my mid-forties, I cannot help but feel a burning Renaissance within my consciousness to see again. I love sitting in a window seat, glued to the little portal when I fly over the Rockies, just fixated on these ripples, millions of years old, jutting out, like your fingers buried in the wet sand on the beach, slowly emerging from the Earth. How magical is it to walk through a forest and experience this network of life extending from the bottom of a bare sole to the canopy above. Lately I’ve been dusting off an old Neuroscience textbook and trying to read it. It never interested me when I first got it. It was simply a prerequisite to understand psychology, something I needed to slog through for credit. I dropped it after one class, losing focus with every bold term I had to memorize. Forget math, when will I ever need to use ‘dendrites’ and ‘cytoskeleton’ in my day to day? I tell jokes for a living.
I imagine you can live your whole life this way. Everything is just one step to the next, a means to an end. I’m trying to see, as best I can, that everything is its own end, its own microcosm of creation and reverence. To think that in every nucleus of a cell, there are 2 meters worth of genetic information stored in 46 little chromosomes. Sprilaing books, spiralling into shelves, spiralling into libraries. There are some estimates, that upwards of 5-6 trillion nucleated cells live in our bodies. To navigate the full length of them, if extended to one another would take 11 hours at the speed of light. What are we even talking about! Each neuron has an axon, its stem, highly specialized for the transfer of information across the nervous system. That length varies from 1μm-to 25μm in humans to as large as 1mm in squid (400-1000) times thicker. How did I not even know this? How did I never care to learn just how intricate and amazing everything in our bodies are? When did our world become so small, that it became an afterthought, some mound of resources to pilfer to make arbitrary goods we inevitably discard. When did my day become saturated with thoughts and bits of information that have no bearing on the quality of my life?
If we can slip from the crowd, and shut ourselves off from the cacophony of gossip, hearsay and opinion, and open our ears to the sound of the wild, to the notes of a beautiful melody, to the laughter of a trusting friend, we will take conscious steps to release ourselves from the decaying, self-aggrandizing echoes of discontent.
We’ve become magpies, collecting illusions that anchor ourselves to a fragmented reality that sheaths us from a Heaven we may never see again. For some it is not until they can count their last breaths, squeezing every last one through a tube of remorse, regret and fear, that the realization of uncompromising beauty, love and connection was always within the conscious tilt of a head staring, not at one’s feet with clenched fists and broken hearts, but at the stories told in the skies above to a little boy or girl.