How Nature Becomes Spiritual and Heals Bodies and Minds
Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.
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RACHEL CARSON
My collaborators Jennifer Stellar and Neha John-Henderson and I had a hunch about how awe may be an antidote to our overheated and overstressed times. We suspected that awe may
reduce the inflammation produced by our immune system, in particular that which arises in response to chronic threat, rejection, and loneliness. How? Why might the wonders of life shift this problematic inflammation? Because in many ways, awe is the antithesis to the social threats that cause the release of proinflammatory cytokines.
Proinflammatory cytokines are released in immune cells throughout your body to kill invading bacteria and viruses. In the short run, cytokines heat up your body to kill the pathogen, leaving you feeling sluggish, vague, achy, and disoriented as the body marshals resources to fend off the attack and recuperate. The trouble, though, is that the human mind treats social threats like an invading pathogen: studies find that social rejection, shame, being the target of prejudice, chronic stress, loneliness, and threats to loved ones elevate cytokine levels in your body.
Awe, by contrast, heightens our awareness of being part of a community, of feeling embraced and supported by others. Feeling awe, we place the stresses of life within larger contexts. Perhaps everyday awe, we wondered, would be associated with lower inflammation.
To test this hypothesis, we gathered measures of inflammation (as assessed in the biomarker Interleukin 6, or IL 6). Participants also reported on their everyday awe by offering responses on a seven-point scale (1 = not true, 7 = very true) to questions like:
I often feel wonder about what is around me. I feel awe outside regularly.
We also measured the tendency to feel other positive emotions, such as pride and amusement. In this study, it was only awe that predicted lower levels of inflammation. Everyday awe, then, can be a pathway for avoiding chronic inflammation and the diseases of the twenty-first century such inflammation is associated with, including depression, chronic anxiety, heart disease, autoimmune problems, and despair. This finding caught the attention of a very large human being who knew the inflammation of trauma well.
Stacy Bare stands six feet, eight inches tall. He has a giant beard and a massive head that stretches the biggest beanies. His voice has the tree-shaking pitch of a moose call. When thoughts of his deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan move through his mind, his gaze shifts to the side and his lips retract—traces of a cry of distress, perhaps, for brothers in combat or innocent Iraqis lying dead by the side of the road. When he talks about the need to do more for veterans than numb their minds with pharmaceutical cocktails, or when he recalls a veteran friend who just took his own life, his prose and prosody slow, moved by a conviction found in getting very close to human suffering.
During his childhood in South Dakota, Stacy was inspired by his grandparents’ stories of awe from serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II. At age nineteen he tried to enlist but was rejected; he was too tall. Instead, he joined the army, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. During these engagements, he suffered from chronic inflammation. This didn’t prevent him from finding awe:
During my year in Iraq I was in a near-constant state of low-grade to high-grade funk. I was being forced into a horrific policy decision and a poorly run war every day. I’d lost friends, watched Iraqis being killed, endured blasts and rifle shots and mortar fire and food that made me crap my pants once a month. I worked mostly for a string of ever-changing leadership, each one intent on “making a difference” in their own way.
The light shifted dramatically.
I turned around and saw a huge, pulsing orange wall charging down the road and obliterating everything in its path. Less than a second and the buildings and cars that stretched on either side of the road were gone. I ran, laughing and smiling, to duck into a concrete structure, a little bunker, on the side of the road. I kept my back against the wind but all around me the bunker filled up with fine misted sand. It caught in my mouth and in my throat, but I couldn’t stop smiling or laughing.
The world was a huge place and I was just a tiny speck in it. My challenges and concerns and worries of life all were erased in an instant as I just tried to breathe. It was a remarkably freeing feeling amidst an otherwise incredibly imprisoning year. In its total obliteration, I also found the dust storm magnificently beautiful.
Even after the dust storm raged past, the orange sky stuck around for a while. There would be other orange skies that I’d stare up into that year in Iraq but never had I been stuck inside the storm as it scoured past me. We can do whatever we want on this planet, I remember thinking, but the world will always win
—so we might as well build as much joy, real joy for all people while we’re here.
So often, vast circumstances confine us, like a life sentence in prison or tending to people who are dying, or racist immigration law, or combat,
circumstances that seem to “always win.” But in recognizing the vastness of such fates, that we are “a tiny speck” in a “huge place,” we can find a “freeing feeling” and even an urge to build “real joy for all people.” We so often experience transformative awe in the hardest of circumstances.
After returning to the United States, Stacy fell into an overheated abyss. He had lost good friends on tour. His girlfriend broke up with him while he was away. Images of the dead invaded his mind: a young girl killed by U.S. bullets; a dog eating the neck of a bloated dead man in a pile of trash. About one in five Gulf War veterans falls into major depression. The suicide rate for younger veterans, like Stacy, is among the highest of any group in the United States. About a quarter of veterans binge-drink regularly. Stacy turned to hard alcohol, cocaine, and speed. And edgy, compulsive partying. A suicidal voice was making loud suggestions in his mind.
As he was spiraling downward, a friend insisted that before Stacy blow his brains out, he go climbing with him on the Flatirons near Boulder, Colorado, a series of five sandstone slabs that jut upward to heights of over seven thousand feet. Stacy had rappelled down tall vertical walls dozens of times. On this day, though, tied to a wall of rock, looking down hundreds of feet, he froze. His body trembled. He sobbed. What was the point of his service? A career in the military? The lives of the people he saw die? His life? A single phrase arose in his mind.
GET OUTDOORS.
Strange Sympathies
Every experience of awe you enjoy today links you to the past, to others’ experiences of the sublime and how they made sense of them within the ever-evolving cultural forms that archive the wonders of life. Stacy Bare’s experience of wild awe traces back to an epiphany experienced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
In 1749, Rousseau was on his way to visit his friend, the philosopher Denis Diderot, who was serving time in a prison in the outskirts of Paris. As he walked through rolling hills, Rousseau mulled over this question: “Has the progress of the sciences and arts done more to corrupt morals or improve them?” Today we might ask: “Have globalization and capitalism lifted up our quality of life, or paved the way for our demise?”
Contemplating that question knocked Rousseau to the ground. In a trance state, he saw the brightness of a thousand lights. He sobbed uncontrollably. He was shaken by an epiphany: The much-hyped promise of the Age of Enlightenment, of science, industrialization, formal education, and expanding markets, was a lie. It was destroying the soul of humanity. It was a companion of the systems of slavery and colonization, and a cause and rationalization of economic inequality. It was decimating the forests of Europe, polluting its skies, and filling its streets with filth. And smothering the wisdom of emotion.
Rousseau’s epiphany was that in our natural state, we are endowed with passions that guide us to truth, equality, justice, and the reduction of suffering—our moral compass. We sense these intuitions in music, art, and, above all, being in nature. It is institutions like the church and formal education that disconnect us from our nobler tendencies. In that experience outdoors in the hills outside of Paris, Romanticism was born.
Within the philosophy of Romanticism, the purpose of life is to free yourself from the confines of civilization. Find yourself in freedom and exploration. Passion, intuition, direct perception, and experience are privileged over reductionistic reason. Life is about the search for awe, or what the Romantics called the sublime. Music is a sacred realm. Natural processes—thunder, storms, winds, mountains, clouds, skies, life cycles of flora and fauna—have spiritual meaning and are where, above all else, we find the sublime. Rousseau was urging Europeans to get outdoors.
The spirit of Romanticism would inspire Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein during a stormy holiday in the Alps. It would stir the poetry of Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Wordsworth, which my mom taught in her English courses at California State University, Sacramento. This
spirit gave rise to a holistic kind of science that sought truth in images, metaphors, art, and unifying ideas alongside the necessary, reductionist breaking down of phenomena into parts. It led to the epic voyages of James Cook, Alexander von Humboldt, and eventually Darwin, and their poetic portrayals of the natural world. Romanticism transformed our relationship to nature, once viewed with terror and superstition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was moved by this spirit of Romanticism. Grief-stricken at the death of his wife, Ellen, at age twenty-two, Emerson traveled to Europe, making his way to Paris. There, in July 1833, Emerson experienced an epiphany in the Jardin des Plantes.
In 2018, I felt impelled to visit the Jardin des Plantes, and went inside its Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy, which is the size of a basketball gym at a small college. Its insides look like a train station that might have been painted by impressionist Claude Monet: cast-iron frames surround an off-white, diaphanous ceiling illuminated from outside. Upon entering, the visitor is greeted by a sculpture from 1758 of a skinless man with taut red muscles. He stands in front of a procession of a hundred or so skeletons of every imaginable species, from gorillas to narwhals to hyenas to chimpanzees. It is a day-of-the-dead awe walk of comparative anatomy. His head and eyes are oriented upward to a faraway horizon, or perhaps the skies, his mouth open, his eyes alive. He is awe in the flesh.
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Here is our leader of the awe walk of comparative anatomy. This sculpture is from 1758 and was used at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in drawing classes.
Touring the perimeter of this march of skeletons, I encountered jars containing the brains of pigs, dogs, elephants, and humans. One held a white kitten floating in blue fluid, frozen as if falling from deep space to the ground. Crude papier-mâché sculptures of bisections of various animals stood in cabinets. In one area, jars contained genetic anomalies—a headless puppy, a two-headed pig, human twin fetuses joined at the jaws. Visiting children stood unusually close to their parents, leaning in, their mouths agape. The parents fumbled for words to explain.
For Emerson, the riches of nature, of organized flora and fauna, that he encountered in the Jardin des Plantes stirred wild awe:
Here we are impressed with the inexhaustible riches of nature. The universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever, as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms. . . . Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer,—an occult relation between the very scorpions and man. I feel the centipede in me,—cayman, carp, eagle, and fox. I am moved by strange sympathies. I say continually “I will be a naturalist.”
In Emerson’s being moved by “strange sympathies,” we find the pattern of awe—vastness (“inexhaustible”), mystery (“the universe is a more amazing puzzle”), and the dissolving of boundaries between the self and other sentient beings (“occult relation”; “I feel the centipede in me”). Amid the profusion of forms of different species, even the lowly centipede, there is an intuited life force that unites us all. Emerson’s epiphany was about the big idea in the air at the time: that all living systems, from the skeletons, organs, muscles, and tissues of different species to the sense of beauty and design in our minds, have been shaped by natural selection. He was sensing a sacred geometry underlying what Darwin would call “endless forms most beautiful,” and decided that day to “be a naturalist,” finding his spiritual life in wild awe.
A Need for Wild Awe
In 1984, Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson called the “strange sympathies” Emerson felt in the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy biophilia, the love of life and living systems. Biophilia encompasses a rich palette of passions we feel in relation to nature. The most widely studied of these is the feeling of beauty, which we experience in viewing familiar and pleasing landscapes, such as those with rolling hills, trees, a stream or other source of water, thriving flora and fauna, and a place of elevation. Those feelings of beauty
signal to our minds the resource abundance (or scarcity) and safety of a locale and orient us and those we are moving in unison with (in the context of our evolution) to set up camp in what we would call home.
We experience biophilia in almost any kind of nature, from viewing the changing colors of leaves to the phases of the moon. More everyday awe. There are robust communities that have grown out of the awe we feel for clouds, the ocean, waves, trees, and birds, to name just a few. And gardens. Should you encounter flowers in a garden, fragrant pollinating forms of colorful geometry, you are likely to feel sensory delight, a sense of beauty, and perhaps awe, and be more inclined to cooperate. The scents in the garden—of basil, rosemary, camellia, peach, pine—send neurochemical signals from your olfactory system through emotion- and memory-related regions of the brain to the frontal lobes, including the orbitofrontal cortex, where our tendencies toward ethical actions are moved by our emotions. Scents in gardens take us on an awe-inspiring journey, often back in time to other moments of significant fragrance. Those scents signal to us what is pure, life-generating, rewarding, good.
How might we make the case that we have a biological need for wild awe, a need that is on par with our needs for protein-rich food, thermoregulation, sleep, oxygen, and water?
Or the more social needs, like being loved, cared for, touched, esteemed, and respected?
Basic, evolved needs unfold reliably during our development, are supported by specific neurophysiological processes, and if unmet, lead to poor health and social dysfunction. Within this framework, our biological need to belong is clear: it emerges reliably early in a child’s life, is supported by broad networks of neurochemicals (dopamine, oxytocin) and regions of the body (the vagus nerve), and if unmet—think solitary confinement or being an orphan from a civil war—leads to the deepest kinds of dysfunction, such as the stunting of the growth of the brain, chronic illness, depression, and premature death.
Do we have a biological need for wild awe? Let’s begin with the question of development. When given the chance, children find abundant
awe exploring the outdoors; pouring liquids and filling buckets of sand; collecting bugs, twigs, and leaves; climbing trees and digging holes; splashing water; and marveling at the rain and clouds. Our remarkably long childhood emerged in our evolution to allow for the exploration and play necessary for learning about the natural and social environments. Less controlled by the prefrontal cortex (and the default self), children’s brains form more synaptic connections between neurons than adults’ brains and are more oriented toward novel explanation and discovery. The child’s awe-filled relationship to the natural world is a laboratory for deep learning about the systems of life, essential to our survival.
With respect to the neurophysiology of wild awe, the sights, sounds, scents, and tastes of nature lead to awe-related vagus nerve activation and reduce fight-or-flight cardiovascular response, blood pressure, cortisol, and inflammation. Here are but a few empirical examples of how our bodies are like an antenna when outdoors in nature. The sounds of water activate the vagus nerve. Certain scents in nature calm our stress-related physiology. Many plants give off phytoncides, chemical compounds that reduce blood pressure and boost immune function. Encounters with images of nature lead to the activation of dopamine networks in the brain, which animate, you will recall, exploration and wonder.
And as with any biological need, when our need for wild awe is satisfied, we fare better, and when it is thwarted, we suffer in mind and body. In testing this thesis, controlled studies have had people go on walks in nature, or had them view images or videos of awesome nature or see how people living near accessible green spaces fare. Scientists in South Korea and Japan have studied the effects of forest bathing, where people are led through immersive awe experiences in forests—for example, walking, taking in scents, feeling leaves and bark on the skin and with the hands, contemplating for a moment a tree and its remarkable design. When we satisfy our need for wild awe, it is good for our minds; we concentrate better, handle stresses with more resilience, and perform better on cognitive tests of different kinds.
Frances Kuo, a pioneer in the science of wild awe, had children diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder go for a walk of comparable length and physical exertion in a green park, a quiet neighborhood, or noisy downtown Chicago. Children scored better on a measure of concentration only after the walk in the park. Getting outdoors in nature empowers our attention, what William James called “the very root of judgment, character, and will,” and our ability to discern what is urgent from what is not and how to place the hectic moments of our days into a broader narrative. In geographical regions where the population has greater access to beautiful green spaces, people report greater happiness and goodwill toward others.
In fact, it is hard to imagine a single thing you can do that is better for your body and mind than finding awe outdoors. Doing so leads to the reduced likelihood of cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, diabetes, depression, anxiety, and cancer. It reduces asthma in children. It leads to reductions in everyday aches and pains, allergies, vertigo, and eczema. These benefits of being in nature have been observed across the life span, ranging from newborns (who enjoy higher birth weight when born near green spaces) to the very elderly. Our bodies respond to healthy doses of awe-inspiring nature like we respond to a delicious and nutritious meal, a good sleep, a quenching drink of water, or an uplifting gathering with friends or family: we feel nourished, strengthened, empowered, and alive.
Our need for wild awe is strong.
Wild Awe on a River
When Stacy Bare finished climbing the Flatirons and was back on his feet, he would get outdoors with force, rock climbing, hiking, backpacking, skiing, and rafting. He was struck by an idea about the inflaming traumas of combat. When deployed, people in the armed services find awe in the places where they serve and people they meet, in their sense of family, in
the transcendent intensity of being on tour, and in the frequent courage seen in combat. It is often a dark, threat-filled awe that can quickly shift to horror at carnage, chaos, violence, perpetrating harm, and watching young people die. But there is awe there. And the transition to civilian life leaves veterans hungering for awe.
Moved by this idea, Stacy dedicated his life to giving wild awe away. In his work with the Sierra Club, he created programs for hundreds of thousands of people each year to find wild awe on walks, hikes, backpacking, rafting, and rock climbing. He took veterans who had lost limbs in combat and climbed with them up sheer rock faces. He has returned with veterans to places of combat but for purposes of recreation, skiing with locals in the beautiful mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan. For this giving away of wild awe he was named a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year.
When Stacy heard about our study showing how awe reduces inflammation, he suggested we collaborate on a study of wild awe. Our lab was a collection of rafts on the American River, a 120-mile-long watercourse that begins in the Sierra Nevada mountains and winds its way through the foothills to Sacramento, passing through the hills that Rolf and I wandered throughout our brotherhood. Rafting the river alternates between lazy, daydreaming meandering and exhilarating, at times frightful, moments navigating class II rapids with names like Meat Grinder, Satan’s Cesspool, Dead Man’s Drop, and Hospital Bar, which if navigated poorly lands you on Catcher’s Mitt, a big rock that has a penchant for trapping rafts. After the Hospital Bar, though, rafters can heal their banged-up bodies in the Recovery Room. Some of my fondest memories from my childhood are navigating that river in rafts and inner tubes with Rolf and our parents and their friends, drifting in the sun, looking for hours at light on the water, seeing the shadowy brown outlines of rainbow trout below, and feeling the flow and character of the river currents move our bodies and laughter and conversation into a sun-saturated, sparkling unison.
We had two groups of participants. The first included students from underresourced high schools in Oakland and Richmond, California, schools
lacking the green spaces and organic gardens often present in private schools and well-to-do suburban public schools. Many of the teens had never been camping. Growing up in poverty, like these teens did, leads to elevated stress, a greater likelihood of anxiety and depression, and chronic inflammation. Veterans comprised our other group. Veterans can show the same trauma-shaped stress profile as kids raised in poverty: disrupted sleep, intrusive thoughts, difficulties concentrating, and the vigilant sense that peril hovers nearby.
Prior to the rafting trip and one week after, I and my collaborators at UC Berkeley, Craig Anderson and Maria Monroy, gathered measures of stress, well-being, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the latter based on reports of sleep disruption, intrusive memories, flashbacks, and feeling on edge. Before and after the rafting trip, participants spat into little vials so that we could assay changes in stress-related cortisol over the course of the excursion. We mounted GoPros on the fronts of the rafts, allowing us to film, up close, coordinated rowing, synchronized hoots and hollers, collective laughter, oar touching and celebratory calls after navigating dangerous rapids, shrieks of fear, and vocal bursts of awe—wow, oooooh, aah, whoa. After lunch on the day of the rafting trip, we asked our teenagers and veterans to write about their experiences on the river, to tell their stories of wild awe.
As in walking, playing and watching sports, dance, ritual, and ceremony, over the course of the day raft mates’ emotions and physiologies synchronized. At the start, raft mates’ cortisol levels were all different; by the end of a day of moving in unison, their cortisol levels converged. The raft mates also synchronized in their emotional expressions: some rafters emoted together on their rafts in shrieks and howls; others vocalized together in symphonies of ooohs and whoas. The porous bodies of raft mates were merging.
A week after the trip, both teens and veterans felt less stress. They reported greater well-being. The teens reported better relations with friends and family. Veterans showed a 32 percent drop in the feelings and symptoms associated with PTSD.
The reasons why rafting might benefit us are many: the endorphin high of physical exertion, recreating with others, enjoying a breather from life’s hardships, the sights and scents of trees and sounds of the river. In more fine-grained analyses we found that it was awe that brought about the mind-body benefits of being outdoors. Here is a story of awe from a teenage participant:
There was a point today where I noticed . . . everything. There was smoke rolling over the hills, I felt in awe. There was water cresting and breaking over the boat, I felt wonder. I felt peaceful.
And one from a veteran speaks to how awe can heal trauma by putting things in perspective:
Looking up at the star-spattered sky, I thought about the universe and how infinite it is. It makes what I do feel less important; but the opportunity of what I could do more powerful and lightweight. I never see how many stars are in the sky like I did tonight.
Awe can make us feel that our life’s work is both less important than our default self makes it out to be and yet promising in purpose and possibility. Teens’ and veterans’ reports of feeling awe during the middle of the trip, rather than pride or joy, accounted for why they felt less stressed, more socially connected, more loving toward their families, and happier one week later.
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Teenagers in our study of wild awe
Mean Egotism’s Demise
One clear, frigid day, while crossing a common in Concord, Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson was overcome by wild awe, which he described in a well-known essay from Nature from 1836:
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,— my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,— 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 part or particle of God. The name of the nearest
friend sounds then foreign and accidental; to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.
In many ways, “mean egotism” has become a defining social ill of our times. For various reasons, our world has become more narcissistic, defined by self-focus, arrogance, a sense of superiority, and entitlement (although since 2009, narcissism, encouragingly, has dropped slightly). Narcissism can trigger a myopia to others’ concerns, as well as aggression, racism, bullying, and everyday incivility. Not to mention hostility toward the self: narcissism fuels depression, anxiety, body image problems, self-harm, drug abuse, and eating disorders.
To test Emerson’s mean egotism hypothesis, UC Irvine professor Paul Piff and I took students to an awe-inspiring stand of blue gum eucalyptus trees on the UC Berkeley campus. The Eucalyptus Grove is very near the museum that houses the replica of the T. rex skeleton where students did the I AM study of how awe reveals our collective selves. Out in the trees, in one condition, participants looked up into the bark, branches, leaves, and light on the eucalyptus for two minutes, and took in the wonders of what trees are and give. In the other, they stood in the same place, but looked up at a science building (see images below).
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The control condition
After briefly looking up into the trees, our participants reported, in response to questions asked of them by the experimenter, that they were feeling less entitled and narcissistic. When told of the compensation for being in the study, they asked for less money, citing reasons such as “I no longer believe in capitalism, man.” And as all participants were answering these questions, a person—actually in cahoots with us—walked by and dropped a bunch of books and pens. Our participants feeling wild awe picked up more pens than those who looked up at the building.
As mean egotism fades during wild awe, do we “return to reason”? Do brief doses of wild awe enable us to see our lives and worlds more clearly? In the most general sense, this is true: experiences of awe lead us to a greater awareness of the gaps in our knowledge and to consider more rigorously arguments and evidence. Consider the following study focused on wild awe and reasoning in backpackers out in the backcountry. Some backpackers completed a reasoning task prior to hitting the trails in the wilds of Alaska, Colorado, Washington, and Maine; others did the same reasoning task on the fourth day of the trip. The measure of reasoning was ten items from the Remote Associates Test, in which participants are given sets of three words—e.g., “age,” “mile,” and “sand”—and asked to generate one word that relates to all three. The answer in the example is “stone.” This requires that people find solutions based on diverse kinds of reasoning
—noting synonyms, creating compounds of words, and tracking semantic associations. Backpackers on their fourth day out in the backcountry performed 50 percent better on this reasoning task than those hikers just setting out.
Perhaps the most perilous flight from reason today, outside of the denial of human-caused climate crises, is the trend toward polarization in politics. It’s a kind of collective mean egotism. Polarization—viewing ideological and moral issues as matters of a culture war between good and evil people
—has risen in the past twenty years as the result of biases in reasoning. We assume that we are reasonable judges of the world, and when we encounter people who have different views than our own, we attribute their views to ideological bias, concluding that they are nothing but wild-eyed, fanatical extremists.
My Berkeley collaborator Daniel Stancato and I wondered whether experiences of wild awe might defuse such polarization. In our study, participants watched either BBC’s Planet Earth or a control video. They then were asked to indicate their own views on one of the most polarizing issues of the times—police brutality. Following this, they placed other U.S. citizens into different camps on the issue and offered estimates of those partisans’ views. Awe led participants to perceive the issue in a less-
polarized fashion, meaning that they believed that the gap between their views and those of their opponents to be less vast.
Natural Divine
As we have returned to the outdoors in the spirit of Romanticism, many have found more than the quieting of the default self, healthy body and mind, and sound reason. In-depth interviews reveal that Americans often sense the Divine in nature, and feel that they are near that which is primary, all-encompassing, and good. When looking at the movement of a river, or hearing birdsong, or watching clouds, or sitting quietly amid a stand of trees, people feel as though a benevolent force is animating the life around them, which they are part of. In other research, people reported spiritual experiences in backpacking, birding, rock climbing, and surfing.
Still other evidence suggests that nature may be its own kind of temple, offering innumerable spaces where we might experience what we perceive to be the Divine. In one study, sociologists assessed the natural beauty of each of the 3,100 counties in the United States, in terms of the sun, weather, water, and topographical diversity that the county offered. As a county’s natural wonders rose in abundance, its denizens were less likely to attend church or adhere to a religion’s dogmas. Getting outdoors is its own form of religion, though one that takes people away from the buildings, gatherings, ceremonies, and dogmas of a formalized church.
Getting outdoors is returning us to what Indigenous scholars call traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK. TEK is an Indigenous science of our relationship to the natural world, taking varying and local forms in the five thousand or so Indigenous cultures around the world. It has evolved into a cultural belief system, or way of knowing, or science, through tens of thousands of hours of observing flora and fauna, weather systems, the powers of plants, migration patterns of animals, and life cycles; compiling the data; testing hypotheses with empirical evidence and cultural input from
elders; and the transmission of knowledge through oral, religious, and pictorial traditions.
Within TEK, species are recognized as interdependent; they are interconnected and collaborating within ecosystems.
All things are animated by a vital life force, spirit, or shared substance. During experiences of wild awe, we may sense that we share a form of consciousness with other species, a thesis tested in studies showing how plants, fungi, flowers, and trees communicate with one another, and even show forms of intentionality, awareness, and, dare one say, kindness toward others.
Within TEK, impermanence is assumed: all living forms are in flux, always changing, being born and dying, from the first moment of life to its end. We sense this principle in the cycles around us, of the light of the day and night, seasons, the growth and decay of plant life, and life and death itself.
Finally, the natural world is to be revered. And indeed, awe promotes the reverential treatment of nature. In one study, after brief experiences of awe, people in China reported being more committed to using less, recycling more, buying fewer things, and eating less meat (former U.S. secretary of energy Steven Chu observed that the carbon emissions of the world’s cows alone, if considered a country, would rank right behind China and the United States).
Wild awe awakens us to this ancient way of relating to the natural environment. And in this awakening, we find solutions to the inflaming crises of the times, from overstressed children to overheated rhetoric to our burning of fossil fuels. Wild awe returns us to a big idea: that we are part of something much larger than the self, one member of many species in an interdependent, collaborating natural world. These benefits of wild awe will help us meet the climate crises of today should our flight from reason not destroy this most pervasive wonder of life.
In the summer after my brother’s passing, I planned a number of high-altitude hikes, hoping in some way that Rolf would be by my side. The first was a one-hundred-mile route around Mont Blanc, which Jacques Balmat
first summited in 1786 after fifteen tries. Mountaineer Horace Bénédict de Saussure, who summited Mont Blanc shortly after, heard the voice of the natural Divine there:
The soul ascends, the vision of the spirit tends to expand, and in the midst of this majestic silence one seems to hear the voice of nature and to become certain of its most secret operations.
Moved by this ascent, poet William Wordsworth walked seven hundred miles from Cambridge, England, to see the mountain with his sister, Dorothy. Book 6 of his epic poem, The Prelude, is devoted to that journey. In wandering the valleys, villages, ridges, and passes toward Mont Blanc in search of “Supreme Existence,” Wordsworth found “life’s morning radiance” on the hills and “benevolence and blessedness.” And the vanishing self in leaving behind “life’s treacherous vanities.”
The poem’s first line would return to me many times in my search for awe:
O there is a blessing in this gentle breeze.
In grief, I felt my brother to be touching me, speaking to me, in breezes. A few lines later, Wordsworth observes:
Or shall a twig or any floating thing
Upon the river point me out my course?
This sentence oriented me to everyday awe: look to the ordinary, like the twig floating in the currents of the river, to find new wonders of life and, for me in grief, new directions my life will take now lacking my younger brother.
After I landed in Geneva and located my hiking group, we took a bus to Chamonix, France. The Prelude was in my backpack, a gift from my mom from her decades of teaching this archive of awe. On our ascent into the Alps, I saw a wind move through a stand of aspen trees, flickering leaves into alternating patterns of light and dark in the midday sun. I heard Rolf’s sigh moving the leaves. A previous summer—on our last annual mountain hike together—he and I had stood amid a group of aspens in the eastern Sierras that flickered in the same way, laughing at this arboreal show of interdependence and impermanence.
After the orientation that first night, I was approached by a woman in our group of twelve, tall and reserved, with clear, simple phrasing. She would have been very much at home in California’s Gold Rush era in the Sierras where Rolf had lived. Upon meeting me, she asked, “Are you Rolf Keltner’s brother?”
I would learn on the trails that she was his colleague at the school where he taught as a speech therapist, her office right across from his. She told stories of awe about his work. How he could calm the boys down with bear hugs when they were out of control. The spring following Rolf’s death, a vine she had planted blossomed for the first time in years. She sensed him in that flowering.
Hiking each day, we would catch glimpses of Mont Blanc at ever-changing angles, through always-shifting cloud cover and fast-moving mists, while wandering through green valleys and up rocky passes, seeing Wordsworth’s “morning radiance” and being awestruck by the Alps’ “succession without end.” Mont Blanc is never the same. Cloud-shrouded one day. Luminous and creamy the next. Often barely discernible. Other times vast and transfixing. I came to feel transparent to “the all.” I felt the green seep into my body, porous to the mountains. The blithe air indeed lifted my sense of self into an infinite, clear space. I sensed Rolf spread out through the Alps’ valleys and in the air surrounding their peaks.
On the last day of the tour, I took the gondola up to the top of Mont Blanc, packed in with rock climbers, tourists, Swiss families, and excited children, all hooting when we were carried up the face of the mountain. On
the return we dropped down near the face of Mont Blanc in that gondola, all feeling grateful for Swiss engineering. Small, dense rainbows shimmered on the imposing ice of the mountain. They shifted, pulsing, from green to blue to purple to red. The last color was a reminder, for me, of Rolf’s red hair. And that at certain angles white light reveals a spectrum of color that astonishes. And that there are still wonders and mysteries that lie ahead. And that, somehow, he is still part of them.
