Welcome, National Poetry Month. This year’s poster was designed by one of my favorite cartoonists, author/artist Roz Chast. She illustrates Mark Strand’s famous poem. Click the link to order a copy! You can donate to Poets.org while you’re at it.

http://www.poets.org/national-poetry-month/form/poster-request-form

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Apropos of my last post (here), it turns out that Berkeley Social Interaction laboratory (BSI) has done studies on…awe. Awe might be what Ehrenreich experienced in a fashion more ecstatic or charged than the more garden-variety awe that BSI’s Dacher Keltner writes about in this essay in Slate. Some of the early findings from social research suggest that awe, even more than compassion and joy, contributes to a sense of personal well-being and counteracts depression.

Possibly more surprising is the indication from respondents that awe is not as uncommon as we think:

[A] study from our Berkeley lab speaks to the promise of daily awe. Amie Gordon gathered people’s daily reports of awe for two weeks and found that it is surprisingly common in everyday living. Every third day, people feel that they are in the presence of something vast that they do not immediately comprehend. For example, seeing gold and red autumn leaves pirouette to the ground in a light wind; being moved by someone who stands up to injustice; and hearing music on a street corner at 2 AM all elicited such an experience. Intriguingly, each burst of daily awe predicted greater well-being and curiosity weeks later.

When I reflect on my own daily life, I realize that’s true–this sort of experience grounds me many days when I feel I am losing purpose or overwhelmed or simply sad. It might be the sight of a raptor in an amazing dive toward prey, or the shimmer of light on a bird’s feathers, or a particularly stunning sunrise. It might be a story a student tells me, something moving or courageous.

Every once in a rare while, awe is larger, encompasses more, displaces my sense of self, flames into ecstasy. That kind of experience exhausts, whereas “everyday awe” invigorates, calms, balances life toward the bearable. And often, reading a poem pushes me into the state of awe. For Poetry Month, I will grant myself the daily possibility of awe by reading poetry.