October 2012
89 posts
The mercy of God
I grew up without religion or spirituality, and was your typical teenage atheist. But at the age of 11, I began what turned out to be 13 years of severe depression, anxiety, and psychosis. They called it depression but I wasn’t sad - I was terrified. I hated myself and was convinced that everyone else hated me too. I would work myself into a frenzy of self harming every night - every night...
Awesome Variety
I am working towards my master’s degree in neuroscience. My field is absolutely incredible, and there are tiny moments of awe peeking out at me all the time. For example- there are a over a thousand times more synapses (points where neurons communicate) in your brain than there are stars in the entire Milky Way galaxy. And yet these rattle away in almost perfect harmony for your entire life,...
I feel awe and the most alive in the early summer mornings standing out amidst the fields, hoe in hand while the sun begins to crest the horizon. The silence is the sound of peace and timelessness. A cool breeze whispers across the land. The world lights up with rustic oranges, yellows, scarlets, and golds. About my boots, the blossoming plants innocently reach towards the sky. From a tiny seed...
Watching the moon rise over the ocean after reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson on the beach all day. Try it and tell me if I’m not totally right.
Rob Carlson
I am awed by the power of belief. Belief is capable of rejecting the undeniable and embracing the unbelievable. Belief is the portal to an infinite number of possible realities. Near 7 billion people, 7 billion realities, all different; now that’s awesome!
Dick Hall
Aberdeen, UK
Here’s what makes me feel awe: the subtle line between irrational and rational, between awake and asleep, between day and night, between unconscious and conscious. Those sweet moments that prove that, no matter how organized and categorized our (sub)consciousness demands the world to be, there’s nothing but a never-ending continuum of seconds, shades and beats.
Maria
Portugal
Recently there was an awesome thread on Reddit called:
Reddit, what is the most mind-blowing sentence you can think of?
These were some of my favorites:
—————————————————-
My friend once said “Du är för dig själv vad du tänker, du är för andra vad du gör.”
Roughly translated,
...
There was a drunk guy passed out near my flat tonight. It is cold and wet and late, he was slumped over. He wasn’t dead. I managed to rouse him but he wouldn’t budge, would not move just five meters into the doorway with a roof. When he started saying I’m all right I’m all right over and over again I backed off, I said Ok I can’t make you… but really the roof is...
I am one of those people who experiences awe on a more frequent basisthan do most people. Or, it seems so to me. I am not religious. In fact, I count myself as a radical atheist. One who has little intellectual respect for those who don’t understand that when the “founding fathers” described freedom of religion, they also would have agreed with the statement “freedom...
I do a lot of canoeing in the Candian Quetico in Ontario, and there are few things in like that make me feel as loved, alive and at peace than those beautiful sunrises. When my friends and I would watch the sun rise at 4:00am I have never felt so close to them or to nature and God. To be with ones you love watching something beautiful happen… for me, there can be nothing better.
~Catherine...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
This siteis my home page, so each time I turn on my computer, I get a photo of the universe. Nebulae, moon rises, aurorae, falling stars, eclipses (lunar and solar), sky maps — you name it, they’ve got it. Three have actually made me cry: take a look at Flying Over the Earth at Night, A Flight Through the Universe, and Lightning Captured at 7,207 Images per Second.
The world and the...
Music-wise: Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor
Coldplay’s Fix You (when listened to on proper speakers in an empty room in solitude)
Book: Tuesdays With Morrie. Without going into too much detail, it changed my life such that every day I ask myself, “If today is the day I die, would I be happy with the person I am and the things I am doing?” I don’t know if you...
It doesn’t happen every spring, but there’s usually a moment when I’m outside, and the trees are that bright new green, and the birds are fluttering about excitedly, and there’s a breeze, and everything is bursting forth with life, and the universe is in tune… I get an expansive feeling in my chest as if love is about to fly from my chest like a baby alien. ...
Sometimes it’s not only the AWE but when that AWE happens that forges the experience. I couldn’t have been much older than 8 when it happened. My family would regularly takes weekends out to the country and visit my Uncles, Aunts and cousins on the farm. Now we’re not talking about a nice jaunt down a windy paved road guarded closely by towering trees and broken only by a few...
The “passing cloud” pattern of a hunting cuttlefish: mesmerising waves of colour rolling from one end of its body to the other, tentacles and skin contorted into weird distorted shapes to break up its outline so that its prey cannot recognise it. Utterly astounding. Stephen
New Zealand.
I’m all awed out right now. I’m tired of being told about the strangeness of the very small. About the length of DNA, or how many neurons are in our heads. Or about how complicated the smallest cells are, or that space is real fucking big. What happened to things being simply beautiful? Don’t give me the universe and a vast cold nothingness, give me a small life packed with...
A lot of nights, I stare up at the moon and try my very hardest to make myself believe that it’s a sphere and not a disc. No matter how much I know it in my mind, it’s hard to see it that way—to wrap my head around the enormity of it and the vastness of the distance. Once in a while, though, I succeed…usually just for a few seconds. That’s when I feel awe.
Sylvia...
My name is Jen Davino, I’m from Brooklyn, NY and my awe inspiring moment was in Death Valley CA October 2011.
I take part in a charity ride every year to fundraise for diabetes research. Last year I did the event in Death Valley where I helped coach other riders compete their goal in riding 100miles.
At around mile 80 in the 112degree heat I pulled over to stop and stare at the scenery...
I felt the awe you described once, looking skyward standing under the rotating blades of a ~70 meter high wind turbine at Albany wind farm. The size is impressive itself, but its knowing the human effort and ingenuity that went into harnessing natures most raw forces to do useful work, the absolute elegance of the solution and the cleverness of the design that me feel awe as I watched each blade...
I recently had a very bad day, and while I wept wholeheartedly on my bed, my dog Simon came over to me for a pet. When I reached out to pat his head, he growled at me (for a still unknown reason). Reacting like a child, I shoved him away from me—though much harder than I meant to, and he tumbled off the bed rather harshly. I immediately felt this sickening guilt and rushed to see if he...
Without a doubt, my deepest sense of wonder was inspired by my first visit to the Grand Canyon and has been deepened on each successive visit. I’m certain others would list this national treasure as their wonder-inspiring element, and I think that’s part of the allure - it is massive enough for each person who visits it to create and foster a personal connection.
>On my first trip,...
Aside from all musicians everywhere and professional surfers, another thing I’m in awe of is Diego Rivera’s main mural at the National Palace in Mexico City. I’m American but have been living in Mexico City for seven years now and whenever I have people visiting this is one of the few things I will drop everything for and go look at again as it is truly awesome in the original...
awed by running water
At the miracle of freshwater: the river crashing over the cliffs, the pools with big fish in them, the rushing water that runs and runs.
Anne in Alaska
When I am outdoors, and I look up and the huge sky envelops me. The tops of the trees stretch into the massive blue ocean of air that is all around us, but we forget that it’s there. Then as my eyes move down from the trees to the earth, I see other plants and sometimes animals, living on this plane called earth. I look down into the grass at my feet. I sit down. I lay down, face to the...
“Even as a man casts off worn-out clothes, and puts on others which are new, so...”
– I read the entirety of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, but this particular quote gave me an intense chill, and a warmth spread through my chest. It is taken from the Bhagavad Gita.
Caroline Contillo
Goodnight moon and thank you
We’re a twin planet. Not many of us normally think of the Moon as a companion planet, but that is in effect what it is. Most moons are tiny in relation to their master planet. The Martian satellites of Phobos and Deimos, for instance, are only about ten kilometers in diameter. Our Moon, however, is more than a quarter the diameter of Earth, which makes ours the only planet in the solar...
The Inner Life Of A Cell.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKW4F0Nu-UY
This video by XVIVO for Harvard’s BioVision only represents the main processes necessary for a white cell to recognise its surroundings. Now picture that this all happens constantly, hundreds of times per second, in each white cell in your body. There is over 20 billion white cells in your body, out over 10 TRILLION cells in total.
To me this level of...
I had a literal moment of awe when I was driving home today, after a long day. It was dark, and I was looking forward to coming home and going right to sleep. As I turned the corner at the streetlight, there it was; egg-shaped and warm flaxen in colour. Riding low, just above the housetops, was the moon, giant, as if God had placed a magnifying glass over that part of the sky. Even though I was...
When I walk up from the subway station, and see the peak of the Empire State Building through the early morning fog, I say to myself, “Well, we made it this far, what’s next?” -Oliver Hong, Ridgewood, New York
Humanity: Average and Amazing and Made of Stardust
“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”
- Stephen Hawking
“We are made out of stardust. The iron in the hemoglobin molecules in the blood in your right hand came from a star that blew up 8 billion years ago. The iron in your left hand came from another star. We...
