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There, in one paragraph, is Darwin’s epiphany—that life has evolved and is ever evolving. I take this moment in Darwin’s life and writing to be a story of awe. It is grounded in a new way of seeing some essential truth about the world. This passage follows awe’s familiar unfolding: there is wonder (“It is interesting to contemplate”), vastness (“many plants of many kinds,” “endless forms”), mystery (“complex a manner”), and kindness (“most beautiful”). As in other stories of awe we have read, Darwin turns to metaphor—“clothed with many plants,” the Creator “breathes” life into existence. As in traditional ecological knowledge, Darwin sees the profound interdependence of species. We find reconciliation of the awesome and awful, that the “war of nature” gives birth to “endless forms most beautiful.” In taking in a tangled bank near a river, of birds singing, insects flitting about, and worms doing their composting work in damp earth, Darwin saw the laws of evolution, growth, reproduction, inheritance, variability, and extinction. In awe, Darwin found “grandeur in this view of life.”

Tangled Bank of Life

Awe is about knowing, sensing, seeing, and understanding fundamental truths, and leads to epiphanies across the eight wonders of life—transforming how we see the essential nature of the world. William James called this the “noetic” dimension of mystical awe. Emerson’s spiritual experiences in nature revealed “the law of laws,” the deepest truth for him in his understanding of the meaning of life. Reverend Jen’s epiphany in a church told her that she is loved by God. Literary studies speak of epiphanies, such as those in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, or that of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which status quo meanings of society are stripped away and essential truths about our social lives are illuminated. For Toni Morrison, in the epiphanies found by allowing goodness its own speech, we come to understand ourselves.

What is the substance and structure of awe’s epiphany? Its big idea? What form of self-knowledge do we gain in experiences of awe? In our studies and the stories of awe we have encountered, people most reliably say something like: “I am part of something larger than myself.” For Belinda Campos, it was a great chain of sacrifices made by her predecessors that enabled her to attain a PhD. For Stacy Bare, it was being a small cog in a misguided military operation. For Louis Scott, it was seeing his life being imprisoned by a history of racism this country was “founded upon.” For Yumi Kendall, it was feeling part of the history of music. Awe locates us in forces larger than ourselves.

The English language does not offer up a rich vocabulary to capture this sense of being connected to things larger than the self, so individualistic are we. (That task is much easier for speakers of Japanese, for in Japanese one translation of “self”—jibun—means “shared life space.”) As a result, English speakers turn to abstraction, to metaphor, to neologism, or to mystical language to describe this big idea of awe. William James called it “the fundamental IT.” Margaret Fuller “the all.” Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau “the scheme.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called it the “transparent eyeball,” to public scorn. For Yumi Kendall it was a cashmere blanket of sound. For Rose-Lynn Fisher a sacred geometry. For Reverend Jennifer Bailey it is a timeless cycle of religious composting. And many of the people we have heard stories of awe from, ordinarily articulate and well practiced in describing matters of mind and spirit, like Claire Tolan, Robert Hass, Steve Kerr, Yuria Celidwen, and Malcom Clemens Young, simply gesture to a kind of space in which awe touches them, surrounds them, embraces them, embeds them.

What is it that awe connects us to that is larger than the self? That is initially invisible, but in the experience of awe becomes visible? That resists description and formulation, but appears like an image, or holistic pattern, like Darwin’s dreamlike awakening to a vision of a tangled bank of life, as the default self’s grip upon perception is loosened and dissolves?