Just before the rain began again… I sat to write about awe.  A dear friend of mine emailed me to ask if I’d write about my experience with ‘awe’ for a book he’s working on.  As if in response to my intention, the South Korean seasonal pour turned up its volume and so my mind stirred, my fingers typed:  Maybe it knows that I love it. Every warm shower, lightning crack and thunder burst causes my eyes to widen and my mouth to go slack – supported softly by its smiling, curling corners.

I am in Awe.  But it’s easy to forget how to get here.

I first arrived in Awe after riding in the back of an open pick up.  The dirt roads were pitch black with only the wild, bumbling burst of a flashlight to break the night’s skin.  My best friend and I had paid a guy five U.S. dollars to drive us to Volcano Arenal in Costa Rica.  The rain was there too.  Tropical rain.  The type that never turns off it’s sound.  The night was thick with wet and my heart raced as my lungs gulped to squeeze oxygen out of the wind that rushed down my throat and through my hair.  The truck’s gears shifted loudly as it climbed, but like my pulse, never seemed to slow.  Then we stopped.  Our genial guide (only too happy to escort two young American girls across the rocky terrain as they held him tight for guidance) led us to sit upon a small boulder.  Through the thick air, I could see Lake Arenal gleaming in the moonlight.  So still and silent was the surface it seemed a blanket for the sleeping volcano.  I imagined that I was in Middle Earth.  That I was Bilbo Baggins watching the sleeping dragon. Paralyzed by its terrible beauty; I hoped it would wake yet I feared what that might mean.  The beast sighed.  Sulfur mixed with moist as the earth stirred deeply.  My body undulated riding the boulder that softly rocked beneath me.  Suddenly, a bright red ring bubbled, glowed then dissolved as quickly as it had appeared.

For a long while I felt I didn’t breathe.  Then:  Fear.  Delight.  Wonder.  ”Ahhhhh…”

And so here I sit.  Far across the Pacific, more than ten years removed from the volcano, listening to the rain.  If I am diligent to encourage change, honor observation and practice appreciation, I find that I am able to locate Awe almost daily.  Genuinely.  Never when I’m looking for it mind you – but when I am present enough to see it.  The world is beautiful.  To risk sounding overwrought; Nature and Humanity are both breathtaking and heartbreaking.  They giveth and they taketh away.  And it is there upon that fine line that divides the space between the beauty of red lava drawn like magic marker across a black sky and the knowledge that it could just as easily erupt to consume all in its path in less time than it might take to register that the very earth you sit upon is being devoured.  And that you wouldn’t care that your last gasp would sound the same whether you were to live or to die – that Awe exist.


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