When vastness turns your world upside down, you have to find a way of accommodating it in your life, of finding a space for it – even at the cost of changing your life entirely. This is the phase that Keltner and Haidt call ‘accommodation’. They warn us to be careful – we might not succeed in accommodating vastness in our lives. Witches advise against ‘gnostic burnout’, which happens when you concentrate on your spiritual practice to the point that you have problems in the mundane world. Quite a few scientific geniuses ended up with mental health issues.
A failure to accommodate vastness won’t always lead to dire consequences, but it will be terrifying. We humans like certainties, and vastness wipes clean the slate of our certainties. It is again the idea of a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, translated from the language of theology to that of psychology.
As a culture we have managed to accommodate vastness a bit too neatly: we have been ingenious enough to reduce the sky and the earth to maps that fit your pocket. The entire planet is contained within the grid of latitude and longitude.
Story maps accommodate vastness in a way that is less effective but more interesting. By their very lack of reliability, they might lead you along new paths and into new territories – some of them stranger than your strangest dreams.
To find our next key, we will let story maps lead us all the way to Faerie.
THE WORKOUT
1. The Acquaintance with a Tree
Find a tree in your neighbourhood. Every day for a week or more, spend a few minutes with it. Try not to think of it in terms of its taxonomy, as an ‘oak’ or a ‘birch’. Think of it as that particular tree, as you would do with a friend. How tall is it? Notice its bark, its roots, its leaves, the insects and other animals living on it. Listen to it every day: put your ear against its trunk, and listen for at least a minute to the noises coming from within.
By the end of the week (or longer, if you need it), you should have come to consider that tree as an individual being. Did this happen? If not, why?
Make notes in your Book of Wonder.
2. The Rewilding of the Neighbourhood
For a week, make an effort to notice the wildlife that you can find in unlikely places in your neighbourhood: flowers blooming from cracks in the asphalt, squirrels living close to a station. Make notes in your Book of Wonder about the wildlife surrounding you where you live.
3. The Story Map
Over the course of a week, make a note of the feelings and sensations you experience and of the colours you perceive during your commute to work. Record the spots that awaken memories, and those that make you dream about the future.
Then write in your Book of Wonder a story map of your commute to work. In the example I gave in the chapter, the primary school close to my house became ‘the spot where children meet to learn about their future’. Think of each step as an element of a quest, a part of a larger story, and describe it accordingly.
Finally, the next time you go to work, keep that story in mind, looking at your commute through its lens.
What does it change? Make a note in your Book of Wonder.
4. No Pictures Taken
This is not a real exercise; rather, it is a habit that you might want to get into. Every time you are planning an outdoor walk, decide in advance a small number of photographs that you will be allowed to take (for a four-hour walk, two will be plenty), and then stick strictly to that number. This will help you to engage with the world outside with one less filter between the world and yourself.
The Fifth Key
The Lore
You feel awe, dread or confusion, you could even be sick; reality crumbles beneath your feet and you fall over. And you encounter a fairy.
The village of Woolpit, Suffolk, would be unremarkable (although not charmless) were it not for the green children. They appeared on a summer’s day during the reign of King Stephen, in the twelfth century, at harvest time. They came out of one of the wolf-pits after which the village was named. There were two of them, a boy and a girl. They looked lost – and as surprised to be there as the good people of Woolpit were to find them. Their skin was green, and their clothes were of strange hues that did not belong to Suffolk. The villagers asked them where they came from and about their parents, but the children did not speak any English. They spoke a language nobody had ever heard spoken before.
Wealthy Sir Richard de Calne of Wykes took them in; they were children, after all, lonely and afraid. Sir Richard tried to feed them, but they refused everything he offered, as if they did not recognize it as food at all. They went for days without eating, until they saw some raw broad beans, which they wolfed down. They ate only beans for a while, but gradually developed a taste for other foods; as they did so, their skin turned the colour of ours.
The girl seemed to fare quite well in the village; the boy did not. He fell ill and died, leaving the girl alone.
In time, the girl learned to speak English. She said that the boy had been her brother, and that they came from a land of perpetual twilight, bounded on one side by a river. Sources offer differing versions of how they came to Suffolk. One says that they were herding their father’s cattle when they heard a loud noise, and suddenly found themselves in Woolpit; according to another, they followed their father’s cattle into a cave, and then through an underground maze, which brought them to the wolf-pit. But these were descriptions, not explanations. The girl didn’t know by what magic she had come to this foreign land, and she did not know how to go back home. She never found out.
The girl settled among us, as much as she could. She was mischievous, and – the sources hint – too forward in her ways, never fully adjusting to ours. But she worked for Sir Richard, and got married, and led a normal life, and nothing else is known of her.1
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In our search for our fourth key, we saw that psychologists consider vastness to be a fundamental feature of awe. Children are surrounded by vastness, although they don’t realize it: an enormous number of future possibilities are open to them. Will they study humanities or sciences? Will they be passionately engaged with politics, and, if so, will they tend in a conservative or radical direction? Or will they be apolitical? Will they have girlfriends or boyfriends – or both? Or neither? Will they be compulsive travellers, criss-crossing the globe, or will they rarely stray far from their birthplace?
As we grow up, we become smaller: we have to make choices that narrow the possibilities open to us. Life becomes less vast. With every choice we make, we close the door on a thousand others. If you decide to go to law school, you will have to let go that old idea of becoming an astronaut. Whatever career path you walk, however satisfying it turns out to be, you will never get to walk the many other shining paths you could have taken.
This is not unhealthy: if you refuse to make a choice, you end up frozen – a rabbit in the headlights. The inevitable choices can make us nostalgic at times, when we look back to our childhood and we muse on all the different ways things could have turned out. This is not unhealthy either, provided it does not become an obsession. It is worthwhile to be aware of the trade-offs we make. In fact, we should be rather more aware of them than we are.