The Visual Evidence of Inadvertent Awe

Today’s Substack post explains how visible landscape changes can facilitate awe:

Awe is a popular focus for those seeking new and different ways to feel alive or replicate the sensation of being a kid in a candy store without traveling too far.

The experience of awe spans academia, self-help workshops, and podcasts. I understand that awe and urbanism have recently teamed up in Charlotte through the work of the noted Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner (author of AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder), the Gambrell Foundation, and Gehl Associates.

The short message: Caring cities produce awe in their residents. And local governments should act accordingly.

None of which detracts from our paths to inadvertent (and non-urban) awe, as I discovered yesterday—an example of all possible in just a day, with some research and motivation.

With only the cost of time and gasoline, I rediscovered awe under the pretext of the Spring Open House of the Very Large Array, which enhanced the message of the short essay I wrote last October about the best places to observe change. I wrote the essay to fend off a fair amount of critical questioning about how I ended up moving to New Mexico.

At that time, I was engaged in a friendly litany: “Are you no longer an urbanist? I thought you were married to Seattle. Why did you move to Santa Fe? Why not go back to England? You never struck me as the New Mexico type!” I heard all this and more.

In the October essay, I referenced a seminal piece about New Mexico landscapes written 40 years ago by J.B. Jackson, who, as a reminder, said, “[F]or Americans, the place where we see most clearly the impact of time on a landscape is New Mexico.”

Back to yesterday, as illustrated above and below. In just a few hours, I transcended multiple dimensions: a powerful radio telescope array, a noted, vanished mining town above Magdalena (but the church remains in Kelly), and the roots of the Hilton hotel empire in Socorro.

There were no candy stores, but for someone who was a history major and had once aspired to be an astronomer, an archaeologist, a writer, and a photographer, there was plenty of awe to go around.