I used to buy books on astronomy and do my best to fathom the vastness of space. It’s not easy. The best books try and take you by the hand and scale things up step by step. But even then it’s impossible to keep pace. The vast reaches of the universe are just too huge to imagine. At some point my mind gives up trying to encompass it all.
But it’s at exactly that point that something wonderful happens: awe awakens. If this universe that we live in is just SO vast that not even our prodigious imaginations can fathom it, then awe is all we are left with. And awe is an open door to wonder, mystery and magic. When we are in awe, we are in a place of not knowing and that is the key to discovering the vastness that exists inside us.
Our minds like to know, to set everything in rows and order the world we see. But beneath this effort lies a vast sea of consciousness. This is the essence of who we are, the fathomless ocean of being out of which we are born, and of which we are the full inheritors.
Each of our attempts to know our world reduces this vastness to something more manageable. Now we can feel like we are in charge, but we’re not really. Each step along this path of “I know, I can control” takes us further and further away from awe, from the open door inside that leads to our own vastness.
I wanted to create a story for children that would speak to some of this, and you can find an audio recording of the story my intuition brought me below. It speaks of a little mouse who, living in the little cage in her owner’s bedroom, thinks that this bedroom is the whole world. Stage by stage, she is shown how large the universe is, before being brought back home to her little cage again.
And the way she travels is awe. “Oh wow! Oh wow! Oh wow!” she says, as first an eagle, and then an angel show her the vastness of her universe. Her curiosity draws her ever onward, until her heart calls her to return to Earth. “Ah…. home at last!”
There’s something paradoxical about the way this story ends that still tickles me. Yes, we are the inheritors of a vast and brilliant universe, and a vast and brilliant consciousness. But in the end we are best suited to working with what is just here, with what we can see and touch, with what exists at our own scale.
But I feel deeply that we manage this daily life best when our hearts are open to the wonder and beauty of it all – to the vastness that this smallness both conceals and reveals. And we find our way to that kind of living when “Oh wow!” is our mantra and awe is our compass.
The story can be heard here.
