How to Cultivate Everyday Awe
Searching for the tree with the lights in it
My favorite book in this whole wild world is Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. It is a book in which nothing happens, yet every facet of a human life is explored. It is about nature, it is about time, it is about light, it is about metaphysics, it is about the very ordinary becoming extraordinary simply because a person shows up. It won the Pulitzer Prize and it was well-earned.
I’ve read this book at least a dozen times and every time it teaches me something new. Mostly though, it teaches me to pay attention, a lesson it seems I must relearn each year with new gusto.
If you read through my handful of 2023 resolutions last week, you’ll know that presence and attention are vitally important to me because it feels as though I’ve lost so much of my twenties to the attention economy, which continues to find slippery new ways of taking over my life.
In undergrad, of all places, I think I was the most present I’ve ever been. Everything was new and shiny and wonderful and beautiful and horrible and so utterly and perfectly tangible. The books with new ideas I’d never dreamed of were physically in my hands, even the articles were printed and highlighted and cataloged into a folder so that I did not have to bring a laptop to class. The people who made me shriek with laughter and scream with frustration lived under the same roof as me, reaching for the questionably expired milk each morning just as I did, lamenting failed exams with a shared grief, pining and loving and hurting right next to one another, every day. Together. In real-time.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, all existed then too, they were just duller. They didn’t feel as consuming, or perhaps even as vital as they do now. You could of course still end up down a YouTube rabbit hole, or a Twitter rampage, but it felt more playful and less critical. It felt like a fake world you checked in on a few times a day just to see what new things had grown there. I quit all of the platforms at one point or another between 18 - 23 and not once did I feel that I might be missing something crucial for my life or my career. It was just fun. You could take it or leave it.
Something about the platforms changed in the last five or so years, though. They became sparklier, more universally adopted, more important for day-to-day life. Now, as a writer, artist and communications pro, abandoning social media feels like an axe blow to my career and my dreams. It’s not to say I couldn’t do it (that free will at least still exists on the thinnest of margins), but my ability to earn an income and connect with artists and writers and other communities would be deeply impacted.
For now, social media remains something of a pillar of my working life. So cultivating attention has become even more essential.
We return to camper life on Friday. We’ve been out of the camper now as long as we’d been in it. Two months on the road, two months of house sitting/traveling home/crashing in guest bedrooms. Four months of living like a little leaf gushed around with the wind.
Time is expanding and compressing in strange ways. September—when we finally moved into the camper, left Bellingham, and headed back toward what now feels like home—lasted forever. October—when we saw old friends for the first time, traveled to Moab, then Durango, then Taos, then Boulder—rushed by. November and December expanded and contracted in odd, unexplainable ways.
Time marched on.
The camper is exceptional at making each week deliciously present. Even though I over-committed myself to more work than I could reasonably accomplish which caused the days to slip right through my fingers toward the end of the year, my memory is ablaze with dozens of fantastically exceptional moments over the last four months.
There’s the gut-wrenching joy of crossing into Utah for the first time in two years and the crisp stars that burned through the atmosphere welcoming us back. The woman at a rest stop who told us about her show dogs and also her gastric bypass surgery, a conversation that started because she wanted to know what cell range extender we had on our camper. The first slice of Hot Tomato pizza and the feeling of arriving home. The feel and shape of the seven different showers I’ve used since September. The yellow aspens all glowing on Grand Mesa and smelling the way home is supposed to smell. A bottle of rose at a new wine bar sipped over fantastic food. Little cups from Oaxaca that a friend brought back that turned all our mouths blue and gave us a brief panic that we were about to experience cobalt poisoning. The way Fruita dirt tastes different than Moab dirt tastes different than Taos dirt tastes different than Boulder dirt and all those dirts stick to the camper carpet differently.
The days with the least presence in fact were the days spent house-sitting, in which I quickly slid back into my old ways, allowing the days to pass one after another in exactly the same way. Sometimes this is truly necessary work. But I know during this time it was not necessary for me. It was an inability to seek out everyday awe. Without new views and new showers and new food, the work was on me to say, Isn’t this meal incredible? Isn’t this snowfall spectacular? Isn’t this friend the most amazing friend living the most amazing life? And while in hindsight I do think those things, it was entirely lost to me in the moment. I just put one foot in front of the other trying to get through my work weeks.
In his new book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, (another nonfiction book I’m hesitant to purchase because the premise sounds fantastic but I fear it will be another book that should have just been a really long feature) author Dacher Keltner says:
“But you don’t need remarkable circumstances to encounter awe. When my colleagues and I asked research participants to track experiences of awe in a daily diary, we found, to our surprise, that people felt it a bit more than two times a week on average. And they found it in the ordinary: a friend’s generosity, a leafy tree’s play of light and shadow on a sidewalk, a song that transported them back to a first love.”
In Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard spends an entire chapter on light, continually returning to what she calls “the tree with the lights in it,” a description of an ordinary tree she heard from a young girl who had recently regained her sight after a lifetime of blindness. In this sense “the tree with the lights in it,” could literally mean the way light looks filtering between the leaves of a great big oak, but I have taken it to mean the stunning awe of ordinary occurrences.
“Then one day I was walking along Tinker creek and thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame…I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.”
The awe of the ordinary is so splendid because it doesn’t appear every time we look up into a tree. Only sometimes, for reasons we can’t know, are we struck like a bell. And so we must keep looking up at the trees hoping and praying to be struck again.
This is what I forget every year. To continue looking up at the branches, to search for the tree with the lights in it. To remember I am a bell that could be lifted and struck at any moment if only I would pay attention.
Thought provoking.
Love this so much.