I have been witnessing. I have been attuned. I have been immersed in wonder and awe. Not every moment, every hour, but more and more and more. There are big forces out there responding in ways that are incalculable and hard to articulate. They are listening. They have been waiting. It is beautiful. It is interactive. I am learning each day to stay awake, as Rumi says, “don’t go back to sleep!”
Oh this life has so much inner expansion lying dormant for us to touch. Magnificent. Awe inspiring, wonder evoking…. These philosophers, poets and scientists words express this awe and wonder much better than I ever could, but I’m seeing it, feeling it, living it from my home to Chief Mountain – all sacred:
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
― Albert Einstein
“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”
― Carl Sagan,
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats
Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
― Marcus Aurelius
“The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.”
― Richard Dawkins
“The obligation falls upon us to foster in ourselves the sensibilities that modernity has suppressed or even denigrated. … Without awe, our lives are impoverished, our society decays.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel
“Awe, you see, is what moves us forward.”
― Joseph Campbell
“I suspect that it was simply that I had admired the earth, and the universe. The more I say and think that I admire it, and love it, the more it gives me what I admire, or strange coincidences that leave me in more awe than I was before.”
― Michael Whone
