How to Find Awe In Everything

Carson. Sauna. Aristotle. Spiders. Dreams. Figs.

SEAL. Writer. Dispatches on figs, dogs, and the human role in the cosmos.

Pieter Francis Peters. On the Coast of Menton. 1870.

Welcome to all the new subscribers. Today’s theme is on dreams—particularly waking-dreams—and how they can reveal extraordinary meaning in everyday events.

But first, an update on my mutt, Carson.

We took Carson to the park when we noticed his right lip was sagging. We assumed it was the ninety degree heat, appropriately teased him about it, and then went home. On our second walk his right eye started sagging. And suddenly it stopped blinking—the entire right side of his face went completely slack. We ran back to the house. We observed with surreal detachment how our minds visualized each worst case scenario as a protective mechanism and yet our bodies gave way to our emotions anyway. We got in the truck and drove to the emergency room.

We paced the chemical smelling floor for hours waiting to hear what was wrong. We asked ourselves what more could we have done for him? How could we have valued every second we had with him any more than already we did? Finally, we were told in solemn tones he had to spend the night to ensure he could get an MRI and see the neurologist in the morning. We opted not to say goodbye because it might have stressed him too severely to see us and leave us once again. Twenty-four hours later, we got the call it was not a stroke. It was idiopathic, meaning they had no idea what caused it, and he should be alright—and despite the drooping black lip and eyelid, he is still fucking handsome.

What is this if not a reminder we can think about death and devote ourselves more intensely to those we care for, but it is never enough if they go before their time? In fact, it may hurt even more when they are gone, but it leads to a different sort of suffering: not guilt we did not do enough, but pain—unbearably divine pain—that the one we loved so intensely is no more. We decided every second we have left with him would be, if possible, even more attuned to his existence in the space of our lives.

So it was that I found myself sitting on the edge of his tempur-pedic mattress hand-feeding him cold bits of ground beef. His one operative black lip slowly maneuvered to consume each piece carefully, slowly, with an innocent purity that felt like actual pain in my stomach. I took a staggering amount of pleasure in this small act of devotion. There was nowhere else on earth I would have rather been in that moment.

On! On!

1. Either we choose our dreams or they are chosen for us

Aristotle said “Hope is a waking dream.” My sense is everything else in the realm of human experience is also a waking dream: kitting up for the worst case scenario, a gratitude practice, misery, love, boredom, craving, disgust for the world, desire, the list goes on.

The significant point is we get to choose our waking-dreams. If we do not consciously choose them and instead unthinkingly adopt whatever everyone around us tells us to adopt, what is life but a numb and passive drift? If we choose poorly and fail, what else do we find but the savage pleasure of staring that failure full in the face, studying ourselves, and iterating our way to a better life? And if at last we choose well after a lifetime of failures, what is left but a quiet sense of serenity we authored our own lives from acorn to oak, and had the courage to choose our waking-dreams?

2. Time-traveling sauna session with a brother

A brother I did several tours with recently spent a few nights with me. As is our custom, we used my barrel sauna near midnight. The evolution within my furnace of enlightenment follows a standard progression: a calm entrance, an escalating intensity of conversation as the blood heats and the brain fires on all cylinders, until finally the cessation of all conversation as the heart hunts for oxygen. Not a word can be spoken. The only sounds that remain are the deep inhalations and controlled exhalations of two humans reduced to the primality of mere survival—to the sacred act of breathing. At last, after each of us watched two pounds of sweat drain from our pores from the detached observation post within our skulls, we opened the sauna door and walked slowly out of the garage. It was pouring rain and unusually cold. The billowy contours of the coal black clouds above were lit with white lightning bolts, turning the sky into a demonic black honeycomb. Cracks of thunder shook the firmament. We inhaled the cold wet air as we walked between the columns of my fig trees. Each of their massive malachite leaves cupped upwards to the heavens to capture every drop of rain. In my delusion state, I felt as though we stepped back in time; as if we entered a primeval pocket of the past, and then carried this pocket back through time to the present, plugging this savage way-of-being into the non-savage civility of the modern world.

Our discussion, before it was cut off, was about the nature of awe: what is it, how to stoke it, and how to keep it. I believe in my bones if our goal is to find awe in everything, then we must find awe in everything—including our professed inability to find awe. This means finding awe no matter where are: desert heat, freezing rain, muscular pain; an inability to think, ideate, or create; fear, dread, or anxiety. Awe is found in war and peace, danger and safety, ancient and modern, the woods or a windowless room. Above all, awe is found when we tap into the primeval substrate flowing through each of us like an ancient and archaic human chain that grounds us and binds us in pain and beauty.

It is so easy to institute awe in our lives that this truth is, itself, worthy of awe.

3. Silk webs

I am dedicating 2026 to learning the language of nature. I am studying entomology and several other natural science subjects. Every step outdoors is now an almost crippling explosion of observations. I feel as though I am “seeing” our world for the first time, and I walk as if drunk on reverence.

I emerged from the woods and stepped out into a field early in the morning during a ruck. I saw hundreds of spider webs wet with the morning dew, suspended three feet above the earth. Each was about the size of my fist. In the gland, a spiders silk is a liquid protein soup. When it is spun, it passes through an acid bath and hardens, giving it an extraordinary tensile strength, about half that of steel. Each web stood out like moon-white galaxies held aloft by the upper canopy of tall grass and picker bushes. The droplets were chaotic, and yet as a whole they struck me as geometrically perfect, unequalled in their conscious design. I was certain there was a rationality in the pattern of the thousands of tiny droplets that adorned each spiders sanctum. I was almost overwhelmed with the feeling, while watching one of these noble grass spiders spin its web of woven silk, that I was witnessing an ancient law at work. I felt as if I were standing before a colossal fern forest seventy million years ago.

I felt both ancient and young—ancient in that I was transcending the perceived boundaries of my brief blink on this earth and our technologies and our politics, all of which are growing less and less stimulating as time goes by; and young in that I was alive, pumped not silk but blood, and could savor every single day of fig trees, mutts, paper books, cacao with hints of cherry and leather, and other beings sharing their brief bit of time with me.

4. A useful sleeping-dream

I was buckled in a rocket ship in space making reentry into earth. We were aiming for a landing in a cobalt blue bay and knew, to the inch, exactly where we would make impact. I could see the striations of this body of water glittering in the sunlight from outer space. We were going so fast I felt the hyper-clear sensory awareness that follows recognition of imminent and potentially deadly events. In that bizarre dream state in which the fantastical seems reasonable, I knew our plan was to fly full speed through the atmosphere and crash into the sea, and that our ship was built to handle this impact. In a fraction of a second I saw the liquid red fire outside our window replaced by jet black seawater. We hit the sea so hard we instantly plunged hundreds of feet deep. I felt the suffocating weight of multiple atmospheres. I felt trapped inside a metal canister, and my subconscious played several vivid scenarios of death, even as we began the rapid ascent back to the surface surrounded by massive inflatable air cushions. We breached the sea and were tossed dozens of feet into the air and I saw millions of droplets of rainbow colored water cast into the sky, each glistening like crystals in the sun.

I woke up at that moment. It struck me how I had zero control whether the ship would implode in the blackness or not. Mine would be a death in black water wearing a claustrophobic space suit while strapped into a seat. It felt good. It felt good because in that moment of potential black-water-death I was in total command of myself. I was reminded life is always reducible to one thing and one thing only—our control over the contents in our skull. I knew as I woke up that this would be a good day, that I had been given a wise dream, a sleeping-dream inviting me to make of it a waking-dream.

5. Disciplined and elegant reminders to dream wisely

I heard an anecdote recently that hooked in my mind. Xerxes, after failing to defeat the Greeks in 480 BC, ordered Attic figs served for him at every meal to remind him of the land where these figs grew—the land he failed to conquer. We may not agree with his objective, but it is an elegant way to instill within ourselves reminders of our own objectives in life.

We can set reminders for ourselves to define—and choose—our waking-dreams wisely: maybe by studying our sleeping-dreams while our head is still on the pillow and our eyes unopened, pausing to savor in silence the ancient fruits of fig, pomegranate, and cacao, taking walks in the sun or the rain with those we are willing to fight tooth and knuckle for, or merely by luxuriating in the sacred act of breathing.

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