Beauty, Wonder & Awe: The Practice of Living Awake

Children seem to understand something adults spend years trying to remember: the world is completely bizarre and astonishing. A beetle can warrant twenty minutes of investigation. A particularly good rock becomes a treasured possession. The moon follows the car. Puddles are invitations. A caterpillar is breaking news.

Children have not yet become embarrassed by wonder. They stare, touch, ask why approximately four hundred times, and crouch down in the middle of a sidewalk because something very important is happening with an ant. Then, somewhere along the way, most of us become efficient. We learn the names of things and begin to mistake naming them for knowing them. Tree. Cloud. River. Mountain. Body. Love. Yes, yes. Seen it.

We begin moving through the world with the confidence of someone who has already reviewed the material. I think this is one of the quiet tragedies of adulthood—not that the world becomes less extraordinary, but that we become less astonished by it.

Wonder Is a Practice

For a long time, I thought wonder was something that happened to you. You went somewhere beautiful enough, experienced something unusual enough, encountered a moment sufficiently grand, and awe arrived. Certainly that happens. A mountain can make a convincing argument.

But the older I get, the more I suspect wonder is less of an accident and more of a practice. It is a way of looking. The world is constantly offering material: light moving across a wall, the ridiculous intricacy of a flower, steam rising from something warm, the smell of rain hitting dry earth, a person you love laughing so hard their face briefly stops looking like their face.

None of this is particularly rare. What is rare is giving it our full attention.

Maybe wonder is not a personality trait possessed by unusually whimsical people who spend their mornings drinking tea beside windows. Maybe it is a skill. And maybe, like most skills, it becomes stronger with use.

Beauty Is Not Frivolous

Beauty has always mattered enormously to me, although for a long time I think I felt slightly apologetic about that. There are, after all, very serious things happening in the world. Surely arranging flowers, noticing beautiful light, setting a table, making photographs, dressing thoughtfully, or staring excessively at the shape of a mountain is not exactly urgent work.

But I no longer think beauty is frivolous. Beauty changes the quality of our attention. It causes us to pause. It interrupts our tendency to move automatically through the day and says, Look at this. That interruption matters.

I seek beauty in my home, in meals, in clothing, in art, in touch, in nature, and in the people around me. Not because I expect life to be aesthetically perfect—it very much refuses to cooperate with that plan—but because beauty brings me into relationship with what is here. It makes me participate.

A beautiful meal tastes different when I actually sit down to eat it. A landscape becomes something more than scenery when I allow myself to be overwhelmed by it. The face of someone I love changes when I stop looking at them as familiar and remember that they are, in fact, an entirely singular human being who somehow exists at the same moment in history that I do.

That is strange. And wonderful. And worthy of attention.

Awe Has a Way of Correcting the Scale

One of the reasons I love the natural world is that it continually restores perspective. Living in Central Oregon makes this particularly difficult to avoid. The sky is enormous here. The mountains refuse to be subtle. Rivers have spent thousands of years carving their way through rock without once asking whether they are being productive enough.

There is something deeply reassuring about being reminded that the world is carrying on without my supervision. Nature corrects the scale. Standing beneath a mountain, I am both incredibly small and somehow more present to myself.

In my poem Mountain Moment, I wrote about sitting with a heart quaking, overwhelmed by the magnitude of beauty, life, pain, love, journeys, and unknowns held inside one landscape. That is what awe does for me. It takes all the scattered pieces of experience and, for a moment, makes them feel held inside something larger. Not necessarily explained. Just held. And sometimes that is more useful.

Photography, Poetry, and the Same Old Obsession

This is probably why I became both a photographer and a poet. They look like two separate practices, but to me they are increasingly difficult to distinguish. Photography asks me to look, and poetry asks me to look again. One asks me to notice the visible world. The other asks me to notice the interior one.

A camera has trained me to see the way light falls, how a body moves, the expression immediately after the expected expression, and the tiny visual details that alter the feeling of a moment. Poetry asks what happened inside me while I was looking.

Both are practices of attention. Both are ways of resisting numbness. Both are attempts to say: this happened, this mattered, I was here for it.

That same impulse runs throughout my poetry collection, Bliss Born of Pain. When I look at the poems now, I see again and again the desire to inhabit life more completely—to feel the body, notice beauty, surrender to change, encounter the natural world, and remain open to awe.

I thought I had written a book largely about pain. In many ways, I had written a book about learning to notice life again.

The Ordinary World Is Plenty Strange

I think we have been taught to associate awe with rarity: the eclipse, the summit, the birth, the great love, the once-in-a-lifetime journey. And yes, those things can split us open. But a life made only of extraordinary moments would be exhausting. Most of it is going to be ordinary: coffee, laundry, driving, work, dinner, someone asking where their shoes are while standing approximately two feet from their shoes. This is where our lives actually happen.

So the question that interests me is not how to manufacture more extraordinary experiences, but how to become more awake to the ordinary ones. How much beauty can I notice today? How deeply can I experience what is already here? Can I look at something familiar long enough that it becomes strange again? Can I remember that familiarity and insignificance are not the same thing?

A tree does not become less miraculous because I know the word tree. A body does not become less astonishing because I have lived inside one every day of my life. Love does not become ordinary simply because someone has loved me for years. Perhaps one of the great practices of being alive is learning not to let familiarity steal wonder from us.

Living Awake

I don't want to move through my life asleep to it. I don't want beauty to become background noise, or the people I love to become so familiar that I forget to be astonished by them. I don't want to stand beneath a magnificent sky while thinking only about what I need to accomplish tomorrow. I want my life to feel inhabited, and I think beauty, wonder, and awe are some of the ways we enter more fully into it.

This is not as an escape from difficulty, and not as a denial of grief, suffering, or the genuinely terrible things that sometimes happen. Rather, as a refusal to allow difficulty to become the only thing I can see. There is always more in the frame: grief alongside sunlight, uncertainty beside wildflowers, an ordinary morning alongside the extraordinary fact that we have been given another one.

The world has not stopped offering itself to us. Perhaps we simply need to practice receiving it—to look longer, stay curious, and become a little less sophisticated about our amazement. And every once in a while, when necessary, to crouch down on the sidewalk and see what exactly is going on with that ant.