In his office, Frank continued wondering.
“And of course, in the Amazonian rain forest when he spoke of the ‘temple of nature.’ ”
Frank continued.
“And now that I think about it, in his Diaries he writes about waking from a dream in Chiloé, Chile. When he awoke, Darwin was awestruck at intertwined vines on the bank of a river, which would appear in the last sentences from Origins, some of my favorites in all of Darwin’s writings.”
Frank then paused, and in reverential tones that can only be compared to those of a radio personality from the 1940s, quoted those last sentences from On the Origin of Species:
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
There, in one paragraph, is Darwin’s epiphany—that life has evolved and is ever evolving. I take this moment in Darwin’s life and writing to be a story of awe. It is grounded in a new way of seeing some essential truth about the world. This passage follows awe’s familiar unfolding: there is wonder (“It is interesting to contemplate”), vastness (“many plants of many kinds,” “endless forms”), mystery (“complex a manner”), and kindness (“most beautiful”). As in other stories of awe we have read, Darwin turns to metaphor—“clothed with many plants,” the Creator “breathes” life into existence. As in traditional ecological knowledge, Darwin sees the profound interdependence of species. We find reconciliation of the awesome and awful, that the “war of nature” gives birth to “endless forms most beautiful.” In taking in a tangled bank near a river, of birds singing, insects flitting about, and worms doing their composting work in damp earth, Darwin saw the laws of evolution, growth, reproduction, inheritance, variability, and extinction. In awe, Darwin found “grandeur in this view of life.”
Tangled Bank of Life
Awe is about knowing, sensing, seeing, and understanding fundamental truths, and leads to epiphanies across the eight wonders of life—transforming how we see the essential nature of the world. William James called this the “noetic” dimension of mystical awe. Emerson’s spiritual experiences in nature revealed “the law of laws,” the deepest truth for him in his understanding of the meaning of life. Reverend Jen’s epiphany in a church told her that she is loved by God. Literary studies speak of epiphanies, such as those in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, or that of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which status quo meanings of society are stripped away and essential truths about our social lives are illuminated. For Toni Morrison, in the epiphanies found by allowing goodness its own speech, we come to understand ourselves.
What is the substance and structure of awe’s epiphany? Its big idea? What form of self-knowledge do we gain in experiences of awe? In our studies and the stories of awe we have encountered, people most reliably say something like: “I am part of something larger than myself.” For Belinda Campos, it was a great chain of sacrifices made by her predecessors that enabled her to attain a PhD. For Stacy Bare, it was being a small cog in a misguided military operation. For Louis Scott, it was seeing his life being imprisoned by a history of racism this country was “founded upon.” For Yumi Kendall, it was feeling part of the history of music. Awe locates us in forces larger than ourselves.
The English language does not offer up a rich vocabulary to capture this sense of being connected to things larger than the self, so individualistic are we. (That task is much easier for speakers of Japanese, for in Japanese one translation of “self”—jibun—means “shared life space.”) As a result, English speakers turn to abstraction, to metaphor, to neologism, or to mystical language to describe this big idea of awe. William James called it “the fundamental IT.” Margaret Fuller “the all.” Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau “the scheme.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called it the “transparent eyeball,” to public scorn. For Yumi Kendall it was a cashmere blanket of sound. For Rose-Lynn Fisher a sacred geometry. For Reverend Jennifer Bailey it is a timeless cycle of religious composting. And many of the people we have heard stories of awe from, ordinarily articulate and well practiced in describing matters of mind and spirit, like Claire Tolan, Robert Hass, Steve Kerr, Yuria Celidwen, and Malcom Clemens Young, simply gesture to a kind of space in which awe touches them, surrounds them, embraces them, embeds them.
What is it that awe connects us to that is larger than the self? That is initially invisible, but in the experience of awe becomes visible? That resists description and formulation, but appears like an image, or holistic pattern, like Darwin’s dreamlike awakening to a vision of a tangled bank of life, as the default self’s grip upon perception is loosened and dissolves?
My answer is this: it’s a system. I realize “system” doesn’t have the mystery of “numinous,” or wild-eyed excess of “transparent eyeball,” never mind the poetic beauty of “cashmere blanket of sound” or the metaphorical depth of “composting religion.” In almost every realm of inquiry, though, from the study of the cell to formal analyses of dance, music, ritual, and art; to studies of religion, prisons, politics, and intellectual movements; to studies of our brains that make sense of these things, people turn to the idea of systems to make sense of the deep structures of the wonders of life. Systems thinking, it’s worth noting, is at the heart of an Indigenous science now thousands of years old. It is an old, big idea. It may be our species’ big epiphany.
Systems are entities of interrelated elements working together to achieve some purpose. When we look at life through this systems lens, we perceive things in terms of relations rather than separate objects. In feeling inspired at a political march, we may take note of how our calls of protest and fists thrust into the air are linked to those of others and synchronized with the words of a speaker. In noting how a song might bring us the chills, we sense how the notes relate to one another in dynamic, unfolding patterns.
In thinking in this way we perceive patterns of interdependent relationships. Here it is worth quoting Darwin: “these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other.” Various forms of life, we are now learning, from the DNA in our cells to the individuals in our communities, are perpetually engaged in mutual influence, interdependent collaboration, and cooperation. In looking at the flow of people crossing a street, or the movements of five teammates on a court, or the interplay of color, line, form, and texture in a painting, or in marveling at life in an ecosystem, we holistically perceive how the parts of the whole are working together toward achieving some end.