Awe Is Closer Than the Northern Lights

When we picture awe, we tend to picture something grand: a summit at sunrise, a sky rippling with green light, a once-in-a-lifetime view. Those moments are real and precious. But if awe only lives at the edges of the map, most of us will meet it only a handful of times. A short new video suggests the opposite may be closer to the truth.

What the story says

The video, published by Psyche and made by the University of California and the Greater Good Science Center, makes a gentle case. You do not have to travel to Kilimanjaro or wait for the Northern Lights to feel awe or enjoy what it offers. In its framing, awe is all around us, as long as we are willing to look.

A related piece in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review looks at Between Earth and Sky. It explores what macro photography and embodied attention can teach us about how we relate to the natural world. One piece points us outward and the other draws us in close, but both arrive at the same quiet idea. Wonder depends less on where we are than on how we are paying attention.

Why ordinary awe matters for the inner life

Awe has a way of rearranging us. For a moment, the running commentary in our heads goes quiet. The worries that felt enormous take up a little less room. We feel part of something larger than our own story, and often that brings relief rather than diminishment.

Many people live through long stretches without that feeling. Days fill with tasks, screens and other people's needs. Attention gets spent before it can settle anywhere. Life can go on looking fine from the outside while something inside feels flattened, as if colour has slowly drained out of things.

The idea that awe is available in ordinary places is hopeful because it does not ask us to escape our lives. It asks us to meet them differently. Light might move across a kitchen wall in the late afternoon. A stranger might hold a door with real warmth. The veins of a single leaf, seen up close, can look like a river system mapped from above.

The very small and the very vast

There is a reason macro photography and the night sky can stir the same feeling. Look closely enough at a dewdrop and a whole world appears. Look far enough into the dark and you are looking at light that left its source long before you were born. Both remind us that reality is far bigger and stranger than our daily attention usually allows.

This is the cosmic perspective in its most personal form. Knowing how vast the universe is need not make a life feel small. Instead, it can make each moment of presence feel more remarkable. That we are here at all, noticing anything, is its own kind of wonder.

Small invitations to notice

• Pause on something tiny, such as a seed, an insect or a frost pattern, and look until it becomes unfamiliar.
• Step outside at dusk without a destination and let the sky change in front of you.
• Notice one moment of human kindness each day, your own included.
• Leave a little silence after something moves you, before reaching for your phone.

These are not techniques with promised results. They are simply ways of making room.

An Orykl perspective

At Orykl, we see awe as one of the ways people find their way back to themselves. It often appears when we stop managing life and start receiving it. Yet many people come to a point where they cannot quite feel that openness anymore, and they are not sure why.

That is part of what a one-to-one session with a carefully vetted spiritual practitioner can offer, in our view. It is an hour where you do not have to arrive with anything figured out and where you can speak and be heard. Some people find it easier to notice what has been quietly calling for their attention when someone is listening with care. Afterwards, there is space to revisit what came up and reflect on it in your own time. This is a spiritual perspective, offered as support for reflection rather than as treatment or a promise of any outcome.

Sources

• Psyche: How to live a life of awe
• Tricycle: The Buddhist Review: ‘Between Earth and Sky’

Letting yourself be moved again

Awe rarely announces itself. It slips in through the side door while we are paying attention to something else. The invitation from this week's video is simple. Look a little longer, and let the ordinary become extraordinary if it wants to. You may find that the part of you able to be moved by the world never left. It has just been waiting for some room.

If something in you has been asking for more room to wonder, you don't have to explore it alone. A conversation with a matched, carefully vetted spiritual practitioner can be a quiet place to begin.