In 2015 (I think), I posted about the University of Berkeley’s professor Dacher Keltner‘s studies examining the experience and emotion of awe. Now he has a book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. The subtitle’s unwieldy and promises a little much–I’m sensing a publisher’s or publicist’s input there. Keltner’s a psychologist, not a popular self-help author, but whatever…

The ways scientists attempt to study human emotions amaze me with their inventiveness. How does one conduct empirical experiments on anything so wildly subjective? (And honestly, I question whether empiricism is always as objective and reliable as scientists believe it is–though we haven’t developed a better method yet.) This book answers some of my questions about the “how” of studying emotion, which includes a good deal of physiology; after all, human emotions are based in human bodies. Qing Li’s book on forest bathing touches on some of these methods of study as well. Blood pressure, heart rate, breath rate: those can be measured, and there’s exhaustive research that shows how such aspects of our physiology connect with feelings of well-being, even before looking at the roles hormones and neurotransmitters play.

But what about awe? Isn’t that usually a feeling that takes your breath away? That might raise the pulse, that might be fear as easily as joy? Keltner writes about the line between fearful shivers of the Halloween-night kind and goosebumps that appear when humans feel awed. Also our tears–of joy, grief, physical pain, and those tears that we feel when we are “moved” by an act, a place, a work of art. He cites Rose-Lynn Fisher’s photos of tears, which I was happy to see mentioned because I love her work (a poem about those photos appears in my book The Red Queen Hypothesis). He cites Ross Gay’s poems and prose poems/essays of joy and gratitude, in books I happen to love. And Keltner offers an anecdote about poet laureate Robert Hass and the “whoa moment” that arises in “myriad cultural forms.”

Among those forms is poetry, and here’s where this text got me considering what I love in reading poetry and what I may be aiming for when writing it: the term he uses is everyday awe.

Deep awe–I’m not enough of a genius with words to create a sense of deep awe with a poem, though I admire the geniuses who have been capable of such art. But everyday awe? That’s a feeling with which I’ve been familiar since my childhood and which I have never lost sight of. For me, it arises from my favorite pastime: observation. The fog-mantled tent-spider web in tall grass, the sparrows sipping from city-street potholes, the toddler showering his baby sister with dandelion flowers, the smell of honeysuckle early in June, or campfires or cinnamon. Sea spray in my face. Sand in my shoes. The way my mother’s 90-year-old skin stretches and smooths when I stroke her arm. Skunk cabbage unfurling with the morning sun behind it. These things I can write about; the words are everyday words, and this is my everyday world. That, for me, is where the art of poetry and the experience of living intersect.