Welcome to Awedacious Ideas, a summary of what we’re reading, listening to and contemplating as we build a case for awe in the change-making space.
This week’s recap
We thought about loneliness and collectivist cultures in It's not you. It's us. We found solace in dissolving separation through awe in From Self to Systems.
We joined forces with Women in Climate Montreal to launch its first event next month! Curious about how awe-based changemaking makes an appearance in women’s climate circles? Stay tuned.
What we’re reading
Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects by Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown
We are thrilled to announce that author and pioneering ecopsychologist Molly Young Brown will be joining us on The Awe Effect!
What is ecopsychology?
It’s the study of our psychological interrelationship with the rest of nature and the Earth. It recognizes that a disconnect from nature is at the root of so much distress, apathy, and destruction in the world today.
Molly Young Brown has been at the forefront of the ecopsychology movement for decades. She is a revered workshop leader who developed the Work That Reconnects, an interactive group process to help people reconnect with themselves, each other, and the Earth.
The Work That Reconnects draws on the fields of deep ecology, systems thinking, and psychosynthesis – a holistic psychology that recognizes the inherent wholeness within all people.
Does a tree know how to grow? No, it doesn’t have a master plan. It just grows. You know, we need to trust our intuition, our imagination a whole lot more than we do.
-Molly Young Brown
What we’ve been listening to
There’s something insanely awe-filled about time. It’s real, measurable, and yet incredibly subjective and evasive.
Theoretical physicist and black-hole expert Janna Levin explains how the science of time can inspire new thinking and fresh perspectives on a much larger scale. Take a listen to her episode on How to Keep Time.
Well, there’s a lot of scientists who will say that whether or not they’re comfortable using the word spiritual, that thinking about these things gives them a profound sense of meaning and a connectedness to something much vaster than their ordinary lives.
And I often, especially—you know, we’re at a time of great pain and strife and trouble in the world. And I often will meditate on this bird’s eye, even beyond the bird’s eye, to really imagine the Earth under this star, and the star that’s been burning for billions of years. And then panning away from the star and imagining this entire solar system, all of us, silly little people warring together, orbiting together around a supermassive black hole 26,000 light-years away. And that is where we are. That is how we got here.
-Janna Levin
Where we wish we could be
Lisbon. Specifically on March 7th.
Sharing Our Loneliness, a project by Monika Jiang whom we mentioned in our last post about ‘me’-ness and ‘we’-ness, will be holding space to explore modern loneliness, how it feels, and what it really means.
If you’ll be in Lisbon, you can find out more here.
Better late than…
Before we turned the page into 2024, we spoke with Carolina Montilla and Joel Fariss of The Fuzz Podcast. It’s been a couple of months since it was published, but it was such a heartfelt conversation that I truly savored.
You can listen to it here.