Seeing beauty, finding beauty, and photographing beauty has led me to experience
Emergence and Awe
more and more of the time.
The fact that we are living on this beautiful blue planet circling our sun at just the right distance to allow life to emerge fills me with awe, wonder, and gratitude. The whole idea of emergence fills me with awe. Where did everything come from? For what purpose? When I consider the number stars in the sky and the size of the universe I cannot comprehend it all.
Emergence of ever more complex structures seems to be programmed into the nature of our evolving cosmos.
― The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution
Similarly when I look closely at a leaf, seashell, stem or plant I see incredible order and similar patterns. The more I look closely at the world and all of it’s huge and intricate beauty and forms, the more awe I experience.
Today I spent time at Lakewood Cemetery photographing bare trees against the sky and while I was there I came upon two different families of wild turkeys standing in the snow, feathers fluffed out, surviving frigid temperatures. How do they do that? What are they thinking? Do they too long for warmer temperatures? What are they finding to eat? I am in total awe of the survival of wild creatures during our long Minnesota winters.
Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by blithe air—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me … I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Psychologists now understand that experiencing awe activates our vagus nerve, an important part of our parasympathetic nervous system.
Our research finds that even brief experiences of awe, such as being amid beautiful tall trees, lead people to feel less narcissistic and entitled and more attuned to the common humanity people share with one another. In the great balancing act of our social lives, between the gratification of self-interest and a concern for others, fleeting experiences of awe redefine the self in terms of the collective, and orient our actions toward the needs of those around us.
— Keltner and Piff, Why Do We Experience Awe?
When do you experience emergence and awe? Do you feel it looking at a starry night sky or watching a bird fly? Or is it seeing the beauty of a flower, the delicacy of a butterfly? Whatever it is, emergence and awe are worth pursuing. Experiencing them changes us. It makes us better companions to life on this beautiful earth we are living on.
May you walk in beauty.
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