WONDER AND AWE

It might be a stretch to make the connection between a famous dead astrophysicist author and a covey of bobwhite quail, but it was Carl Sagan who came to mind as I was leaning against the truck recently, sipping from a thermos and thinking about the old year just past and the new year barreling toward me while I listened to the soft, pre-dawn covey calls float across the prairie.

That sound always elicits something in me, a sense of awe knowing that I am witness to things ancient and beautiful and mysterious.

And it made me think of a quote.

I’m paraphrasing from memory here, but Sagan once said that it is our destiny to be bathed in mystery and confusion, as the universe will always be much richer than our capacity to understand it.

What a wonderful sentiment that is. How poor would be our spirits and souls if we understood everything around us, everything about us?

One of the primary traits that keeps us human, keeps us grounded, keeps us young at heart, and recharges our capacity to care about the world around us, is the ability to be fascinated; to simply stand in awe of something that will forever remain beyond our ability to grasp, or truly ever know.

Wonder and awe: They are our spiritual sustenance. They’ve been an essential part of the human condition since our distant ancestors first sat around a campfire weaving creation myths as a way to understand and try to comprehend the world around them.

In fact, when you really think about it, that’s from where all art and science is ultimately derived. The desire to understand is what drives our desire to create, but what fuels that desire, what really stokes it, is wonder and awe.

So I guess my truckside prairie-morning pre-hunt bit of philosophical advice is this: Don’t ever lose that wonder and awe — for anything.

When you feel yourself slipping into fatigue, when you start feeling apathetic and jaundiced about life, stop doomscrolling, put down your phone, and go take a walk, alone or behind a dog.

Listen for the whistle of a bobwhite, the call of a meadowlark or a red-winged blackbird. Watch the way a box turtle slowly makes its way across a lonely dirt road.

Marvel at the patterns a snake’s movement etches in the sand. Catch tadpoles, cup them in your hand, watch them swim around in the universe of your palm. Follow the tracks of a beetle to wherever it leads.

Once, on a cold, crystalline November morning, the new sun broke dawn across my face as I followed a dog across a ridge of frost-shimmering prairie grass chasing the vague promise and memory and scent of birds.

That brief, ephemeral light suddenly bathed the world in layers of color and depth so vivid, and in such aching clarity, that I had to stop and bear witness to the beauty of the moment.

What a moment it was. The world had been transformed into a horizontal layer cake stretched from horizon to horizon: Sky, cloud, sky, grass, shadow, grass.

And there, in the very center, floating between layers of light and dark, was a hole in the light shaped like me, surrounded by such beauty I have rarely since seen. I gasped, fumbled my phone out of my vest and snapped one of those hopelessly inadequate photographs that only capture the form of a moment, never the depth, or the magic.

I can’t remember much else about that morning, but I remember the wonder and awe of that moment. And that, in the end, is what keeps me going in the face of the brooding despair and melancholy which have always been a part of me.

And so it should, I believe, for everyone, if you just remember to look for it.

Wonder and awe. In whatever form it takes for you, there’s a whole world of it out there waiting to be discovered and marveled at. All it requires are footsteps and the willingness to see the world through a child’s eye, hear the world through a child’s ear.

I know the cynics among us (and Dog knows I own my share of earned cynicism) would say there’s more than a bit of twee—with a heavy whiff of “Instagram Life Coach” pablum—to that admittedly frothy, lightweight and well-worn advice, especially in the face of such heavy times as these.

The truth is, I’d say they were right, mostly. But sometimes all you can do is look around and ask yourself, “What the hell else can I do right now but go for a good, long, disconnected walk somewhere other than here, and wrap my head around something other than this?”

And I have found, over many years and many walks, that there’s a world of truth and soul balm contained in that simple, self-answering question.

So in this still-new year, in the midst of so much chaos and uncertainty and divisiveness, remember the value of temporary escape into your own world of wonder and awe.

Keep that child’s eye, that child’s ear. Look and listen for the sight and sound of what moves you, and then move toward it.