HRM Resident
2024-04-14 18:51:11 UTC
From the weekend edition of the Chronicle Herald by
For poet and essayist Lorri Nielsen Glenn, awe “is not the
thing in and of itself, it’s the practice of slowing down and
looking.”
When she stares at a tree, for example, it isn’t just a maple
or poplar, it is “this one. Particular. Unique … Unlike all the
others.”
It is the same with a person, Glenn told me, a bird, a beach,
a forest. What matters is recognizing, appreciating, and
honouring “the singularity” of a thing.
That task got easier this week for my Saltwire colleague
Aaron Beswick. When he donned his first pair of glasses,
at age 41, he was “mesmerized by the clarity” of what he
saw, which had gone “from a VHF recording of the world
to high definition.”
Thus, it became easier to note the wonderous in the
everyday, which, he said, can be glimpsed when looking
down from a mountain top on some luminous vista but
also “getting my steps in” while strolling through a stand
of quiet Antigonish County woods.
FEELING INSIGNIFICANT AND CONNECTED
Total darkness eluded us on Broad Cove beach. The most
we got was a shimmering light that bathed the landscape
in a way I don’t think that I had ever seen before.
When I folded up my lawn chair and started walking home,
I didn’t feel forever changed, as so many articles I read in
the lead-up to the eclipse promised I would.
What I did feel was hard to explain: insignificant on one
hand, which is what spending a lot of time staring at a
star 150 million kilometres from the Earth will do to a
person.
But also an undeniable sense of order in the universe.
And a feeling of connection to something. I had just joined
millions of people searching for something bigger than all
of us. How could I not?
first part about the eclipse snipped<
THE SINGULARITY OF A THINGFor poet and essayist Lorri Nielsen Glenn, awe “is not the
thing in and of itself, it’s the practice of slowing down and
looking.”
When she stares at a tree, for example, it isn’t just a maple
or poplar, it is “this one. Particular. Unique … Unlike all the
others.”
It is the same with a person, Glenn told me, a bird, a beach,
a forest. What matters is recognizing, appreciating, and
honouring “the singularity” of a thing.
That task got easier this week for my Saltwire colleague
Aaron Beswick. When he donned his first pair of glasses,
at age 41, he was “mesmerized by the clarity” of what he
saw, which had gone “from a VHF recording of the world
to high definition.”
Thus, it became easier to note the wonderous in the
everyday, which, he said, can be glimpsed when looking
down from a mountain top on some luminous vista but
also “getting my steps in” while strolling through a stand
of quiet Antigonish County woods.
FEELING INSIGNIFICANT AND CONNECTED
Total darkness eluded us on Broad Cove beach. The most
we got was a shimmering light that bathed the landscape
in a way I don’t think that I had ever seen before.
When I folded up my lawn chair and started walking home,
I didn’t feel forever changed, as so many articles I read in
the lead-up to the eclipse promised I would.
What I did feel was hard to explain: insignificant on one
hand, which is what spending a lot of time staring at a
star 150 million kilometres from the Earth will do to a
person.
But also an undeniable sense of order in the universe.
And a feeling of connection to something. I had just joined
millions of people searching for something bigger than all
of us. How could I not?
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HRM Resident
HRM Resident