Awe as awakening to interdependence

and a few recipes for calming the nervous system

“Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world. Vastness can be physical. For example, when you stand next to a 350-foot tall tree...Vastness can be temporal as when a laugh or scent transports you back in time…Vastness can be challenging, unsettling and destabilizing. In invoking awe, it reveals that our current knowledge is not up to the task of making sense of what we have encountered. So in awe we go in search of new forms of understanding. Awe is about our relation to the vast mysteries of life.” - Dacher Keltner, “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life”

It’s been a weird few weeks of considering awe—both the magnificent and terrifying—and it made me want to look back at Dacher Keltner’s book on the subject. 

Three weeks ago, I spent some time pressing my foot into the imaginary brake of the passenger seat floorboard as we drove hairpin turns up the side of the Sierra Nevadas. We were on our way to Sequoia National Park where the views took my breath. And then as we walked among the giant trees, I felt grateful to be breathing in their oxygen.

A few days later we drove Highway 1 in Big Sur—another breathtaking and harrowing stretch. Both these places sort of scared and thrilled me. I kept saying to myself like incantation “channel anxiety to awe”...”channel anxiety to awe.” 

Then within 48 hours of returning home to Florida, Hurricane Helene pushed in storm surge that flooded the bottom floor of our condo building and plowed on to Appalachia where the destruction has been devastating. It brought with it a different sort of awe. The kind that I don’t think I can separate from my anxiety. A night after another monster storm, Hurricane Milton, aurora borealis lit up the skies. The colors were wondrous to see—but worrisome too knowing the lights show another type of severe storm, this one geomagnetic and posing possible threat to power grids.

The roller coaster of these awes—soaring heights and grand landscapes to threat-based awe and the heavy feelings of helplessness while seeing devastation in North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina and Florida, has had me profoundly shook. I know we are all feeling it. The storm(s) and realities of the climate crisis devastating communities where friends and families live and work, the tension of an election that’s about three weeks away, the daily headlines of bombs and deaths in lands thousands of miles away and the everyday challenges of each of our lives feel like an especially pungent monster soup (hat tip to Megan Thee Stallion for the term). 

These different types of awe, I’m learning—thanks to Keltner’s book—do have an important commonality. They show our interdependence and how our choices and actions are all part of a larger web. As we’ve watched the images and heard the stories, we’ve wanted to share and give and help. Because we know—despite the efforts of the worst politicians who want to place blame and divide us—we really are all in this together. All of us can relate to, for example, the idea of leaving or losing home and the memories it holds regardless of perceived divisions and voting patterns.

“The epiphany of awe is that its experience connects our individual selves with vast forces of life. In awe we understand we are part of many things that are much larger than the self.” -Dacher Keltner

All of which raises the question: what to do? Dan Harris of the 10 Percent Happier podcast recently posted that “action absorbs anxiety.” I’m also taking inspiration from friends Margaret Littman and Will Norrid, who have both posted some helpful to-dos the past several days on taking care and showing care at this time. I’m passing along a couple of their suggestions and adding a few thoughts of my own in hopes it will help.

Here’s what I’m going to do—and not do. (And yes, this is a pep talk for me too.)

-I’m not going to vote for people who relentlessly attempt to divide us by spreading harmful lies for personal gain about emergency response. Our government has its problems, no doubt. (Ask my parents who needed FEMA’s help when their business flooded with eight feet of water in the 1990s.) But the guy who lies relentlessly—and I don’t need to say his name, because you already know —especially in efforts to “other” the marginalized, has been at it again in ways that cause serious harm and get in the way of relief. FEMA reps have needed to appear on television and create pages on their site just to combat misinformation. Ain’t nobody got time for that. 

-I’m not going to vote for people associated with Project 2025. Trump and Vance have tried to distance themselves from it, but we know at least 140 former advisers from the Trump administration are involved with the conservative think tank that published it. The plan wants to gut FEMA, cut climate initiatives, eliminate the National Weather Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency.

-I’m not going to support candidates who are climate change deniers. Last year in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis rejected $350 million in climate funding one month before hurricane season. This year he signed legislation to remove references to climate change from state law. No time for that pettiness either. The burning of fossil fuels is making oceans verifiably warmer, which makes hurricanes stronger with more rapid intensification. The climate crisis is here.

-I will do what I can to hold space for and actively help the hurting. And yes, that also could mean the very individuals who voted for or will vote for aforesaid candidates I’ve sworn to oppose. Sometimes that will mean rolling up the sleeves (with patience for those coordinating volunteer response) and sometimes that means staying out of the way and writing a check to local organizations on the ground. I know firsthand how evacuation can be expensive and complicated. I was touched by the way the wonderful Margaret Renkl wrote about it in her latest column. I also know the magnitude of these storms is causing some people to conjure and spread conspiracy theories, because worldviews have been challenged in this devastation. I will try to foster connection, education and understanding. 

-I will do better to take action in the ways I can personally in this climate crisis. As Adrienne Maree Brown says in Emergent Strategy, “small is all.” We can create ripples that matter. And again, I’ll vote for and help elect our best hope currently for clean energy jobs, a clean energy economy and climate action. 

- I won’t look away. I won’t numb out. I won’t allow myself to get cynical about where we are. But every now and then, I will try to put down the phone. I’ve been in a catatonic doomscroll since Helene, and I know it won’t help us find the resilience we need. I’ll cook and share good food and be grateful for it. I’ll get into nature and remember that we are nature too—wild in our own ways (hat tip to Conservation Florida) and capable of imagining new ways forward. I believe/hope we can use our unique gifts to work together in an interdependent system for the culture shift necessary in this moment. 

---

Recipes for calming the nervous system: 

• I spent part of my time waiting out Milton in North Georgia where we, of course, had some soup beans and cornbread, my ultimate comfort meal. Loving-kindness and strength to my Appalachian brothers and sisters.

• This is my favorite nourishing “feel good” soup loaded with sweet potato and greens and spicy with ginger. It’s like my body says thanks when I eat it. 

• Here’s another stew I’ve been making a lot. I made this the day before Helene arrived. Then afterwards I made this zucchini bread to help remind me of the happier parts of coastal and subtropical places feeling vulnerable and wounded right now. It’s a good one for sharing. 

Thank you for reading.