Awe

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.