Savoring Awe

Being open to awe is the experience, savoring that experience is the spiritual discipline. This unique "companion" for the spiritually adventurous explores both the awe and the savoring in twelve chapters that include both stories, quotes from others, examples, line drawings, and questions for reflection and discussion. Savoring Awe both challenges and inspires. Here are some of the quotations from the book:

“We need to pay attention.” Really pay attention. Lest we become blind to the awe and wonder that fills our days.” — Marcus J. Borg

“The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand.”—Annie Dillard

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” —Simone Weil

“In a world as myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: To look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.” — Ocean Vuong

“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one, but I give myself to it.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

“Awe chose us, the way gold chooses aspen, the way love chooses friends, the way shorter days choose fall, the way beauty chooses what will die.” — Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

“It is good, every once in a while, to let ourselves be stupefied by gratitude, to cast upon ourselves a spell against indifference.” — Maria Popova

“Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.” -- Abraham Heschel

Tim Diebel is a native Texan, a retired Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) parish pastor, a musician, a curious and creative wonderer, an avid reader and writer. Since 2011, he has lived on a Warren County, Iowa, farmstead with his wife, Lori Alexander Diebel, learning to grow food and savor awe. Together they tend a large vegetable garden, a native prairie, a flock of laying hens (and an occasional recalcitrant rooster), honey bees, and a myriad of fruit trees, all under the watchful eye of their two beloved Welsh Corgis. Tim is the author of Home by Another Way: Harvesting Taproot’s Wisdom. Follow him on taprootgarden.substack.com.