Wonder and Awe
at the World
I wrote this book entirely on computers, primarily Selina, my desktop, and my laptop, Columbia. For someone who loves the outdoors as much as I do, I spend an awful lot of time staring at the screen, but that’s part of the price I pay for the role I play in society as a writer, artist, and would-be advocate for environmental causes. I grew up with computers; they’re an integral part of my understanding of the world I inhabit, just like nonhuman nature. With the ever-expanding importance of the Internet as a mode of communication and exchange of ideas, I can’t do my job if I disconnect entirely.
There’s a reward for the strain I sometimes feel when I’ve been sitting at the desk too long, trying to tease out just the right words from my brain to the pixels on the screen. Even when I am most deeply immersed in technology, I am connected to the world around me. From the background photo on my desktop to the logo for my website, I’ve placed little reminders of nonhuman nature all around my workspace, physical and virtual. These reminders assure me that once I’ve put the last few words down and get to take a break, there’s a whole big world out there waiting for me. When break time comes, I step out the apartment door. Sometimes I’m greeted by raindrops pattering on the landing, soaking into the worn Astroturf and pinging off the metal railing. Other times, I walk down the stairs to a street bathed in broad sunlight. When I open the door at night, it’s positioned just so that I can see the moon rise if the timing’s right and the clouds cooperate.
I walk down the street, and depending on the time of day or night I might see scrub jays in the cherry branches and on the power lines, or a raccoon ambling across the street to nose at another garbage can. In spring I smell the rhododendron blossoms that lay against the siding of old houses, and I keep my eyes peeled for black morels popping up out of patches of mulch. A couple walks by so engrossed in each other that they barely notice me, never mind the brown rat foraging in the grass just a few feet away. Occasionally I am treated to my favorite nighttime sky, deep midnight blue with pale white clouds overhead.
All of these are quite ordinary, and yet they are what I find so extraordinary about this world. It’s not just the pretty colors of the flowers or sweet songs of the birds that get to me. It’s that they exist in the first place and how they got to be here that truly moves me. The more I understand of the workings of the world, the more precious and beautiful and fragile it all seems. Photosynthesis is a miracle, eating is a sacrament, and the Big Bang is the greatest mystery that we’re untangling with every new discovery.
I got into totemism and animal magic almost twenty years ago because I was that kid who loved animals, and finding a spiritual path that centered on them seemed to be exactly what I needed. But it took several years for me to figure out why I needed it. I spent a long time trying to find “the way,” sometimes engaging in ever more complex devotional regimens in the hopes of being pious enough, other times exploding my entire practice to smithereens and starting all over. It wasn’t until I stopped trying so hard and just went outside more that I finally returned to what had first fed me when I was young: wonder and awe.
We use these words all the time, but what do they really mean? Wonder is to think about, to consider; we wonder about something that prompts us to want to know more. To be awed is to be overwhelmed by something, not in a horribly terrifying manner but in a sense of deep reverence and appreciation (and maybe a little healthy amount of fear depending on the situation). Wonder leads me to explore trails and crannies and see where they lead, and awe is what I feel when I am so immersed in what I find that I can’t contain how I feel.
Many of us are so overstimulated by our environments that we’ve become numb to all but the loudest, fastest, and most intense sensory input. For some, the first step to reclaiming our sense of wonder and awe will be learning to be open to the world again not in its artificially amped-up forms but in the way it really is. It may take some time and patience but all is not lost; we can learn to appreciate the things we have taken for granted.
The totems are our allies in the reclamation process. They are not simple one-dimensional helpers limited to stereotyped meanings from dictionaries. They are vibrant, intelligent, dynamic beings sharing the world with us as much as anyone else, and while we may have forgotten what it is to be in nature’s community, they have not. They’re still waiting with their physical counterparts in the land and water and skies, holding a place for us to return to, and I am grateful to them for that. They helped to reawaken in me my wonder and awe, the tiny flame put into me when I was first born into this world and all was new to me.
If I could give nothing else to my readers, no other lesson or piece of wisdom or spiritual tool, it would be the feeling that everything in our world is amazing, worthy of exploration and preservation. That “worth” is not defined in terms of our selfish needs—simply, it exists. I would give everyone an understanding of the universe’s intrinsic value and not one iota less.
I invite you to talk to the totems. Ask them what they would show you, if you would only look and listen. Be open, be interested, and be curious.
Good paths to you.