The Wonder Report

Notes on the art of transcendence

I. THINGS THAT SHRIEK IN THE NIGHT

I like to listen to the forest at night. I’m not the best sleeper, and I’m often awake in the wee hours. So I keep the window above the bed open, even in winter, even if only a crack, so that I can hear whatever’s happening in the woods around our house. The wilderness conducts a surprising amount of noisy business under cover of darkness: deer clomp single file along narrow trails, looking for a safe place to rest; skunks shuffle among the leaves, foraging for bugs. Foxes cry out, sounding for all the world like women in pain, while whole packs of coyotes come unhinged every time they make a kill, their frantic yipping filling the air with a rising, hungry madness.

And lately there has been The Shriek. I’ve been night-listening to these woods for the better part of fifteen years now, and have never heard anything like it. The first time was a few days ago. It was around 4am. I was lying awake under layers of quilt, taking slow, deep breaths, hoping to lull myself back to sleep. The forest was unusually quiet. The only sound was my own breathing. And then: a loud, piercing cry. First a long, high steady note, and then some sort of muddled decrescendo, resolving finally in something that I can only describe as a ghost of a hoot. It wasn’t an actual hoot. But it was haunted by one.

Moonrise on a summer night, June 2024, copyright Erin O’Connor

I wondered about that sound for days. It didn’t quite sound like an animal being killed — something I know too much about from my years of eavesdropping on the private night sounds of the wild. But it did sound anguished. I thought it was probably a bird, because it seemed to come from high in the trees, but sound bounces around in these woods, especially at night, and I couldn’t be sure. Maybe it was a hawk or an owl? Or a jackrabbit screaming? None of it seemed quite right. The more I tried to get a read on the sound, the more my memory played with me, and the less sure I was about what I had actually heard.

Then, the other night, I heard the sound again. It was just as creepy as I remembered. Long, loud, high, stretching tight for two, three, four seconds, and then slackening, bunching, the aural equivalent of a elastic band losing tension, all of it resolving, just as I had remembered, into the faint hint of a hoot. It was a layered sound, forceful and fearful, and it was definitely coming from high in a tree. It had to be an owl. But it couldn’t be an owl. I know the owls around here. They don’t sound like this. Still….

I grab my phone and in the blue light of the screen I pull up recordings of great gray owls, barred owls, great horned owls, northern saw-whet owls, and flammulated owls. I skip screech owls and barn owls because I know them the best. Screech owls are too tiny to make such a big noise — they twitter softly to one another, their voices bouncing like little balls from tree to tree. And barn owls don’t even have voices: they hiss. I know their harsh, otherworldly calls all too well.

None of the recordings sound right. So I go ahead and listen to screech owls, and I'm right about them. Then I listen to barn owls, and I discover something that, at this point in my life, should shock me less than it does: I was wrong. Barn owls, I discover, do have voices, and they do not communicate by hissing alone. They also scream. In fact, they are screaming specialists: they have a scream for distress, another for warning, another for announcing their presence. Male barn owls also have a seductive scream. It is very soft, and apparently the lady owls find it irresistible. I work my way through these screams, for no good reason other than it’s something to do in the middle of an insomniac night, finally landing on a short YouTube recording of a pissed-off barn owl. That’s it. The shriek I have been hearing outside my window is very like this, only longer, shriller, more urgent, more pissed.

Thrilled, I listen to it again. And then it happens. An answer comes from the forest. Not the terrible shrieking this time, but somethings softer, quieter, almost soothing. The barn owl outside my window has heard the owl on my phone. It has recognized the virtual owl’s distress. And it is very clearly responding – not with more distress, not with aggression, but with something gentle, something that sounds a lot like an offer of solace to a kindred soul.

This is a wonderful moment, literally a moment full of wonder, and it hits me hard. It’s electric, this feeling: like I have been struck by a thunder bolt. A wonder bolt. The charge of it jolts me up and out of myself. I am no longer annoyed to be lying awake in the dark, stuck in my dull old thoughts, unable to sleep. I am instead wholly, simply awake, here, now, and I am in awe of all of it: to be in this bed in this house in this forest on this autumn night, to hear the owl among the evergreens, forgetting its own cares that it might ease those of another.

II. WONDER MATTERS

I share this story, which is personal and strange and a little spooky, because wonder matters. A lot.

“Wonder,” UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner writes in Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life, is “the mental state of openness, questioning, curiosity, and embracing mystery.” Wonder is more than an emotion. It is an attitude, a way of being that “arises out of experiences of awe.” Awe, Keltner notes, “is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” And awe is all around us, available just about everywhere we look, if we’re open to it.

What Keltner calls “everyday awe” may be found in art, nature, music, and the “moral beauty” of people doing good, courageous, awesome things. We can find awe in the “collective effervescence” of crowds — think stadium sports and concerts. Awe can also be intensely private — it’s there in spiritual revelation and intellectual epiphany, at birth and death, in the fullness of love and the stabbing of grief. Awe is everywhere, if we just pay attention. The more we look, the more we find, and the more awe we find, the more likely we are to live in an ongoing state of wonder. And that is critical.

Wonder matters for our personal wellbeing. It matters for the health of communities, cultures, and whole societies. It matters for the future of our poor, bedeviled planet. And we don’t have nearly enough of it in our busy, distracted, resolutely secular, counter-spiritual lives. We’re so caught up in our to-do lists and inboxes, notifications and feeds, obligations and chores and the doomed effort to service the endless imperative “should” that we race right by it. If we do manage to bump into wonder, we often fail to recognize it for what it is, or forget it as soon as it’s over. Worse, we hardly ever share our rare experiences of wonder with one another: we exist in isolation from this most wondrous of way of being, unaware of it in others, and blind to it in ourselves.

This is no way to live. I mean that literally: Without wonder, we aren’t fully alive. Consider:

• Wonder is good for us — it lowers the heart rate, reduces stress, quiets anxious rumination, and releases the feel-good hormone dopamine. Wonder is, in other words, a natural anti-depressant. To experience wonder is to get high on life.

• Wonder re-calibrates us — it is a psychic corrective, an exercise in perspective-taking. In one study, subjects were asked to draw themselves before and after an awe-inspiring experience. In the “after” drawings, people drew smaller versions of themselves; their sense of their place in the bigger picture had changed.

• Wonder brings us together — it makes it easier for us to collaborate, cooperate, and connect. Even though wonder is often something we experience alone, it leaves us feeling more generous and compassionate toward others, so much so that some scientists suspect wonder evolved specifically to help us form the strong communal ties we need for survival.

• Wonder cracks us open — it shows us new ways of seeing the world, new ways of thinking and being. Wonder unleashes creativity. It is an engine of invention.

All of this is to say that wonder is essentially human biology’s own highly evolved spiritual practice. It’s mindfulness without the minding part: it’s involuntary, grounded in the body, occurring without thought or intention as long as we are open to it. With wonder, we can be our best selves and can bring those selves into community in generative, positive ways. Without it, we struggle — we have a hard time living with ourselves, and we may find it just about impossible to live with others. We know this to be true, because we live this truth every day.

III WONDER DEFICIT DISORDER

We’re living in a wonder drought, suffering, individually and collectively, from what Tom Waits has memorably called a “deficit of wonder.” It’s gotten so bad that one mental health professional suggests that “wonder deficit disorder” is a defining malaise of our time.

Wonder deficit disorder is exactly what it sounds like: “an acute inability to apprehend the wonderful, sublime, beautiful, or transcendent in any part of experiencing life because of chronic loss, disappointment, acute boredom, bitterness or despair.” Symptoms include diminished capacity to sense the extraordinary, impaired ability to create or to respond to creativity, loss of laughter and inspiration, the disappearance of dreaming, and flight into addiction and distraction — or, alternatively, obsessive focus on hyperefficiency, practicality, busyness, and taskwork.

This is a terrible way to live, or not live — it’s untrue to our nature and unwise for humanity. “Wisdom begins in wonder,” Socrates said; without wonder, it follows, there is no wisdom. The converse is also true: Ignorance, stupidity, despair, and a dangerous willingness to dehumanize those who are different from us: these things thrive in the absence of wonder. And this has a lot to do with why we have become such a divided, unhappy culture — a culture that has lost its sense of cohesion, and has instead been shattered by the anger, recrimination, and hatred that defines polarization. As psychologist and awe-expert Kirk Schneider puts is, “The polarized mind — or a fixation on one point of view to the utter exclusion of competing points of view — interferes with cultivating awe.”

A world without awe is a world without wonder. A world without wonder is a world of closed, incurious, fearful minds — a world riven by panicked tribalism, where freedom matters less than the false security of sameness, where originality and individualism are wrongly seen as deeply threatening to community, and where disagreement and dissent become capital offenses, crimes worthy of punishment by social — or actual — death.

This is the edge we live on.

But there is hope. If the absence of wonder and awe makes us vulnerable to polarization, intentionally cultivating awe helps bring us together across our differences. Dr. Keltner has been studying this for years. In one study, Keltner and his team showed subjects a time-lapse film of the night sky and asked them to think of past experiences of awe. Then they measured subjects’ convictions on hot-button issues such as immigration, racism in policing, and the death penalty. They found that, in contrast to control groups, the “awe” group expressed less certainty on the issues, more openness to other points of view, less animosity toward those with other opinions, and more willingness to interact with people whose politics differ from their own.

Awe increases intellectual humility and openness; it eases social connection and enables us to bridge our political divisions with grace. And it does this fast. According to Keltner, “people who feel even five minutes a day of everyday awe are more curious about art, music, poetry, new scientific discoveries, philosophy, and questions about life and death. They feel more comfortable with mysteries, with that which cannot be explained.”

Art, music, poetry, scientific discovery, philosophy, the mysteries of life and death: To this list I would add storytelling.

IV WONDERFUL STORIES RESTORE WONDER

The essence of awe is a pleasurable dissolution of self. So is the essence of storytelling. A good story draws us in so deep that we forget who we are — even that we are. The brain on story is a brain that has merged with the story, a brain that is actually experiencing the storyline as real, lived events. This is not conjecture: fMRI scans of the brain reveal that when we get lost in a story, we really do get lost. We become the characters we care about. And we see them in our mind’s eye, even if we’re not watching them on a screen: when reading or listening, we form strong mental pictures of the action, effectively projecting the story like a film inside our heads. Story carries us into consciousnesses other than our own, and our brains live, for a time, as though we were another. Scientists call this phenomenon “transportation,” and it is, in its effects, very like the experience of wonder.

Like wonder, story makes it easy for us to get over ourselves. When we are transported by story, we become open to new perspectives and new ways of being. Narrative transportation enhances humility, cultivates curiosity, and grows our capacity for empathy. Stories are deeply private, personal enchantments: by transporting us into the minds and lives of imagined others, they show us how to be better selves, how to be better with others, and how, ultimately, to be better in the world.

All of this is to say that stories are powerful wonder engines. And as such, they can also be powerful tools for fighting polarization, which depends upon the absence of the very things that wonder, stories, and especially wonderful stories generate: wide open minds and cracked open hearts, fearless curiosity in the face of difference, respectful tolerance for dissent, and the humbling awareness that we are, each of us, at once very small in the great scheme of things, and a unique, essential piece of a magnificent, mysterious whole.

V WELCOME TO THE WONDER REPORT

I spend an enormous amount of time thinking about hatred, cruelty, and power; abuse and evil; and lots of related ugly things. That’s what it means to devote yourself to the problem of polarization. It’s also, I increasingly believe, just a requirement of life — after all, what we do not understand will eat us alive, and if that happens, there’s no clear way out. As Margaret Atwood says in her sentence-long retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, “it’s dark inside the wolf.”

And so, for all these reasons, I’ve found it critical to study – and, to the best of my ability, to practice – the best states of mind we humans have: love, compassion, gratitude, joy, simple presence, humility, and curiosity. That last one is a big one — for the opposite of hatred is not love. The opposite of hatred is curiosity. It is wondering — the willingness to wonder, and, through wondering, to live in a state of wonder.

For all these reasons, Maurice and I have decided to share occasional reports on our own wondering – things we’re reading, watching, thinking, learning, experiencing, and discovering; things we’re curious about and things that are inspiring us; things that make us feel connected to something bigger, deeper, and more true than the inevitably small, routinized round of our individual days.

We’ll send a wonder report whenever we feel like it — which I expect will be often — and we’ll include whatever we want. In this way, we’ll capture moments of wonder as they arise, and we’ll share them with you while they’re still fresh and warm and alive.

Our hope is that some of our wonder may become yours, that in reading of our inspiration you become inspired in some way as well.

Our hope, too, is that you’ll share your own wonderful moments, whenever and as ever you wish. We’ll catch your wonder, as you catch ours.

Together, we can transport one another through our stories of wonder. Along we way, we can create more spacious, transcendent versions of ourselves. We can wire our brains for a better world.

So: Welcome, one and all, to the Wonder Report!

You’ve got my owl story — which is a story of wondering my way into a state of wonder. Now it’s your turn. What are you wondering about? What’s inspiring awe in your life lately? Take a second to think about it. And if you are so inclined, please feel free to share in the comments.