The Deep Structures of the Wonders of Life

Maybe someday I will walk down the hall, and someone will see the human in me.

― Ari Tison, Saints of the Household

I populate these posts with photographs I've taken on my phone. I also share them on Facebook and other forums as seems appropriate. Yet I almost never take a photo with the intent to share or use--I only share and use the pictures because I already have them. They are there, so why not? No, I take my photos because I enjoy the process of taking them. It's a practice I've developed. Taking them helps me pay attention to the world around me, to be in the habit of seeing everything around me as potentially interesting. To see things in novel ways. To find delight everywhere I look.

A friend on Facebook recently commented on one of my shares: "All awesome. Have you ever printed any to display? or is too hard to choose favorites?" This, after a week or two of contemplating, is my response. I knew it at the time, but needed a bit of time and context for the right words. Taking pictures, for me, is a process, not an end product.

Though, since I have them, I share, hoping the bit of joy they bring me might do so for others as well. Facebook has started showing me photo groups in my feed, pictures similar to the ones I try to take. Three that I've chosen to join and contribute to:

• Minimalist Photography
• Unspectacular Subject Photography
• Happenstantial Art

Happenstance is an important word; as is the concept of taking good photographs of "unspectacular subjects." I would most likely enjoy a quality camera, some professional training, and the time to put myself in dramatic places at dramatic moments, but that's not what matters. What matters is seeing normal, everyday, unspectacular things in ways that make me feel something.

Feel awe.

I recently read Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner. Because I feel awe from nature more than anything else, I usually take my pictures when meandering through nature. I have already developed a habit of what Keltner calls "the awe walk."

Grounded in this idea that walking engages an awe-like form of consciousness, [a colleague] and I developed an awe practice called the awe walk. We were simply naming what has been a universal tradition to seek awe in walking meditations, pilgrimages, hiking, backpacking, and after-dinner strolls. Here were our instructions:

• Tap into your childlike sense of wonder. Young children are in an almost constant state of awe since everything is so new to them. During your walk, try to approach what you see with fresh eyes, imagining that you're seeing it for the first time. Take a moment in each walk to take in the vastness of things, for example in looking at a panoramic view or up close at the detail of a leaf or flower.
• Go somewhere new. Each week, try to choose a new location. You're more likely to feel awe in a novel environment where the sights and sounds are unexpected and unfamiliar to you. That said, some places never seem to get old, so there's nothing wrong with revisiting your favorite spots if you find that they consistently fill you with awe. The key is to recognize new features of the same old place.

Using my camera helps me "take in the vastness of things" and "recognize new features of the same old place." Looking at the pictures later helps me remember what those moments felt like.

More on Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner. First, my review:

In teaching happiness for more than twenty years, I have seen how much health and well-being we gain by being amazed at things outside ourselves. By finding awe.

An enchanting and enlightening book.

Keltner defines awe as the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world. Awe comes in many forms and can be hard, especially in English, to describe. It is an encounter with something that leaves a person feeling connected to that thing and expanded by the encounter. And, Keltner shows, in many ways, awe makes people happier, healthier, better people. In this book, he defines and describes awe in its various forms through science, anecdotes, and personal experience, teaching readers to better recognize and find it, plus ways to experience awe more frequently.

"We can find awe," Keltner writes, "in eight wonders of life: moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spirituality and religion, life and death, and epiphany." Or, a bit more descriptively, in:

. . . the strength, courage, and kindness of others; collective movement in actions like dance and sports; nature; music; art and visual design; mystical encounters; encountering life and death; and big ideas or epiphanies. These wonders are all around us, if we only pause for a moment and open our minds. There are so many opportunities for everyday awe.

And that's the best thing about this book. Not only is it interesting and entertaining, it offers myriad insights into finding one's own awe. It's not a book to read with curious detachment, but one to learn from and find inspiration in.

It should not surprise that people who feel even five minutes a day of everyday awe are more curious about art, music, poetry, new scientific discoveries, philosophy, and questions about life and death. They feel more comfortable with mysteries, with that which cannot be explained.

Highly recommended.

And a plethora of excerpts that resonated:

How does awe transform us? By quieting the nagging, self-critical, overbearing, status-conscious voice of our self, or ego, and empowering us to collaborate, to open our minds, to wonders, and to see the deep patterns of life.

Why awe? Because in our distal evolution as very social mammals, those individuals who united with others in awe-like patterns of behavior fared well in encounters with threats and the unknown. And because in the more proximal calculus of thriving in the present, awe brings us joy, meaning, and community, along with healthier bodies and more creative minds.

Where do we find it? In response to what I will call the eight wonders of life, which include the strength, courage, and kindness of others; collective movement in actions like dance and sports; nature; music; art and visual design; mystical encounters; encountering life and death; and big ideas or epiphanies. These wonders are all around us, if we only pause for a moment and open our minds. There are so many opportunities for everyday awe.

Aye, I'm all for something that will quiet my nagging, self-critical, overbearing, status-conscious inner voices.

While part of a larger discussion, I find this important:

Culture shaped awe in profound ways. Students in Beijing more commonly found awe in moral beauty--inspiring teachers or grandparents and virtuosic performances of musicians. For the U.S. students, it was nature. And here is a cultural difference that left us shaking our heads: the individual self was twenty times more likely to be the source of awe in the United States than in China. U.S. students could not help but feel awe at getting an A in a tough class, receiving a competitive fellowship, telling a hilarious joke, or, for those true narcissists, posting a new photo on Tinder.

The individual self was twenty times more likely to be the source of awe in the United States than in China. That is really telling.

Later in this post the term Heroic Individualism will come up from another source. It's the same dynamic.

Awe makes us kinder.

In moments of awe, then, we shift from the sense that we are solely in charge of our own fate and striving against others to feeling we are part of a community, sharing essential qualities, interdependent and collaborating. Awe expands what philosopher Peter Singer calls the circle of care, the network of people we feel kindness toward. William James called the actions that give rise to the circle of care the "saintly tendencies" of mystical awe--to sacrifice, share, put aside self-interest in favor of the interests of others. Our studies find that these "saintly tendencies" arise in encounters with all eight wonders of life.

This is but a small sample of the evidence provided.

This is important.

It is a myth that awe is rarefied, reserved for when we have enough wealth to enjoy lives of taste and "culture." The responses of the men in blue tell us this is so. So too does recent empirical work. One study found that people who have less wealth report feeling more frequent awe during the day, and more wonder about their everyday surroundings. It is tempting to think that greater wealth enables us to find more awe, in the fancy home, for example, or exclusive resort, or high-end consumer goods. In fact, the opposite appears to be true, that wealth undermines everyday awe and our capacity to see the moral beauty in others, the wonders of nature, or the sublime in music or art. Our experience of awe does not depend on wealth; everyday awe is a basic human need.

Everyday awe is a basic human need.

The book is full of sections like this in all of the different realms of wonder; this one just really jumped out at me:

Musicians express emotions . . . by producing sounds that resemble the acoustics of our vocal expression of emotion. In empirical tests of this idea, musicians are asked to use their voices, or an instrument, or even just a drum, to communicate different emotions. They do so, research finds, by producing music whose sounds resemble emotion-specific profiles of pitch, rhythm, contour, loudness, and timbre. Anger, for example, is conveyed in slow sounds with lower pitches and rising contours, like a roar of protest. The musical expression of joy is done with higher-pitched, quickly shifting sounds with rising contours, like the sounds of good friends tittering or a stream flowing during spring. When these samples of music are played to ordinary listeners, we have no trouble discerning ten different emotions, even from the beat of a drum.

Feeling emotion is feeling connection.

This is from the section on religion.

The shared experience of mystical awe transforms our individual selves in ways that make for stronger groups. For example, empirical studies involving thousands of participants find that feeling a sense of spiritual engagement is associated with increased well-being, a reduced likelihood of depression, and greater life expectancy. And greater humility, collaboration, sacrifice, and kindness that spread through groups. Groups that cultivated these tendencies through forms of religion, a new line of theorizing contends, fared better in competition with other tribes that did not, over the course of our evolution. More intelligent design.

For more about evolution favoring the social and cooperative, see The Acme of Evolution where I delve into This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution by David Sloan Wilson.

Finally, the longest bit I pulled out, from the concluding chapter. I found it the most powerful and important of all.

Awe is about knowing, sensing, seeing, and understanding fundamental truths, and leads to epiphanies across the eight wonders of life--transforming how we see the essential nature of the world. . . . 

What is the substance and structure of awe's epiphany? Its big idea? What form of self-knowledge do we gain in experiences of awe? In our studies and the stories of awe we have encountered, people most reliably say something like: "I am part of something larger than myself." . . . 

The English language does not offer up a rich vocabulary to capture this sense of being connected to things larger than the self, so individualistic are we. As a result, English speakers turn to abstraction, to metaphor, to neologism, or to mystical language to describe this big ideas of awe. . . . 

What is it that awe connects us to that is larger than the self? That is initially invisible, but in the experience of awe becomes visible? . . . 

My answer is this: it's a system. I realize "system" doesn't have the mystery of "numinous," or wild-eyed excess of "transparent eyeball," never mind the poetic beauty of "cashmere blanket of sound" or the metaphorical depth of "composting religion." In almost every real of inquiry, though, from the study of the cell to formal analyses of dance, music, ritual, and art; to studies of religion, prisons, politics, and intellectual movements; to studies of our brains that make sense of these things, people turn to the idea of systems to make sense of the deep structures of the wonders of life. Systems thinking, it's worth noting, is at the heart of an Indigenous science now thousands of years old. It is an old, big idea. It may be our species' big epiphany.

Systems are entities of interrelated elements working together to achieve some purpose. When we look at life through this systems lens, we perceive things in terms of relations rather than separate objects. . . . 

In thinking in this way we perceive patterns of interdependent relationships. . . . Various forms of life, we are now learning, from the DNA in our cells to the individuals in our communities, are perpetually engaged in mutual influence, interdependent collaboration, and cooperation. In looking at the flow of people crossing a street, or the movements of five teammates on a court, or in the interplay of color, line, form, and texture in a painting, or in marveling at life in an ecosystem, we holistically perceive how the parts of the whole are working together toward achieving some end.

In systems thinking, we note how phenomena are processes that evolve and unfold. Life is change. Our communities are always evolving Nature is about growth, change, death, and decay. Music and art are continually transforming, in the changes they stir in our minds and bodies. Our spiritual beliefs and practices are continually decaying, distilling, and growing.

Our default mind gravitates to the certain and predictable--fixed, reliable essences in the world. Awe arises when we perceive change. . . . 

Awe enables us to see the systems underlying the wonders of life and locate ourselves in relation to them. . . . 

Our default mind blinds us to this fundamental truth, that our social, natural, physical, and cultural worlds are made up of interlocking systems. Experiences of awe open our minds to this big idea. Awe shifts us to a systems view of life. . . . 

Awe enables us to see that life is a process, that all endless forms most beautiful are deeply interconnected, and involve change, transformation, impermanence, and death. . . . 

Awe integrates us into the systems of life--communities, collectives, the natural environment, and forms of culture, such as music, art, religion, and our mind's efforts to make sense of all its webs of ideas. The epiphany of awe is that its experience connects our individual selves with the vast forces of life. In awe we understand we are part of many things that are much larger than the self.

Awe enables us to see the systems underlying the wonders of life and locate ourselves in relation to them.

Learn to perceive things in terms of relations rather than as separate objects.

I sometimes find everyday awe in poems.

Chris Anderson

LIVING THE CHEMICAL LIFE

I have to admit that I don’t care about the historical Jesus.

One way or the other.

I’ve always thought there were larger forces at work.

The sun and the wind. The sadness that comes in the afternoon.

Did you know that our bones are only 10 years old?

No matter how old we are, it’s always the same.

Something to do with cells, I guess. With regeneration.

There are miracles like this all over the place,

in everybody’s bloodstream, and that’s alright with me.

Doris Day was once marooned on an island with another man.

Years went by and her husband, James Garner,

was about to marry another woman. Polly Bergen.

But then Doris came back and sang a lullaby to her kids,

then tucked them into bed. And they didn’t even know who she was.

I think that life is just like this.

Sometimes we are the stone and the Spirit is the river.

Sometimes we are the mountain and the Spirit is the rain.

—from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

There are miracles like this all over the place.

And I constantly find moments of awe in books.

Recently I read They Set the Fire (The Teddies Saga #3) by Daniel Kraus. Here are my thoughts.

In the daylight, out of the snow, the teddies got a good look at one another for the first time since the courthouse. As rough as they looked, they had to laugh. Their wounds were overwhelming evidence: not of failure, but of a life well lived.

Since the first pages of the first book in this saga, when the teddies came to life in a landfill wondering who they are--and, more importantly, why they are--I've loved this trilogy. It's the clash of warm, fuzzy innocence against a dangerous and often cruel world, desperately searching for reason and meaning.

In this final book, once again the teddies come up against terrors of both the physical and psychological kind; and, once again, they find the grit, persistence, and love in themselves journey on. As the cover indicates, this time, for a while, they try making themselves into fierce and dangerous terrors. In the end, they complete their self-appointed quest--though not without further losses--and the find meaning they need to carry on with satisfying lives.

This story has offered a unique mix of ingredients, snuggly teds in the hands of a horror writer, and has ultimately proved to be a wonderful work of philosophy. I've loved it and am sad the tale has reached its end.

"Why did we come to life?"

The Mother folded her spotted hands in her lap. Her teeth were old and yellow. But Buddy thought is was the best grin he'd ever seen.

"Life can be wonderful. But it also causes a lot of suffering. Have you found this to be true, Buddy?"

"Yes, I have."

"That's why I think we--all of us--were put here on this world. To soothe one another's suffering. I did it by giving the Originals to people who needed them. But you can do it however you like. Through laughter. Through caring for the sick. Through cooking delicious snacks. Through snuggling, if you happen to be a teddy."

Reginald stood up beside Buddy. With so much of his belly stuffing gone, he swayed beneath the weight of his head.

"But we never found children of our own," he said. "Whose suffering could we soothe?"

The Mother smiled tightly, as if holding back a chuckle. She looked at Reginald, then at Buddy, then at Proto, then back to Reginald.

"Oh," Reginald said. "We did it for one another.

Buddy felt a sad gladness, an emotion as invisible as fireplace heat and just as strong. The teddies had spent their whole lives searching for someone to comfort, unburden, cheer, and love. It had never been a child.

They were the ones they'd been looking for.

Spend your life finding someone to comfort, unburden, cheer, and love.

A recent report from Pew Research Center

Attitudes on an Interconnected World

How close do people feel to others around the world? How much do they want their countries involved in international affairs? How do people’s experiences with travel and feelings of international connectedness relate to their views about the world?

These are among the questions we explored in a recent 24-nation survey. We found that while most respondents feel close to people in their countries and their local communities, they are more divided over how close they feel to others across the globe.

A median of 50% say they feel very or somewhat close to people all over the world, while 46% feel not too or not at all close. Feeling close to others around the world is more common in Europe than in other regions. Only 35% express this view in the United States, and it is even less common in Argentina, Indonesia and Israel.

When it comes to engagement and cooperation with other nations, views differ significantly among the nations we polled, but a median of 55% want to pay less attention to problems in other countries and concentrate on problems at home; 43% think it’s best for the future of their country to be active in world affairs. . . . 

In many nations, people on the ideological left are particularly inclined to say their country should be active in world affairs. Those on the left also tend to believe their country should consider the interests of other nations even if it means making compromises.

This ideological gap is largest in the United States, where it has increased substantially over the past few years. Since 2019, about two-thirds of American liberals have consistently said they favor taking an active role in world affairs. But the share of conservatives who hold this view has declined significantly, and it has also declined among those who describe themselves as moderates.

The U.S. is the home of heroic individualism.

A good article from Psyche.

How Nietzsche’s Insights Can Help Fight Fanaticism

Resentment narratives paint a picture of life in which all of one’s problems and difficulties are traceable not to the rich ambiguity of the world, or to personal faults, but to simplistic, us-versus-them dichotomies. Their most basic form is this: you suffer because a group is unjustly harming you. The Proud Boy sees feminism and liberalism as destructive forces devastating men’s lives; the ISIS member believes that only an apocalyptic war with those who deny its teachings will correct the world’s faults. These narratives foster a totalising, negative orientation toward an outgroup. They instruct us to hate those designated as responsible for our problems. They vindicate us if we accept the narrative, absolving us of personal responsibility for our difficulties and failings by placing the blame squarely on an outgroup’s shoulders. Finally, they provide us with a readily achievable goal: to respond with hostility and aggression toward the oppressing outgroup. The driving philosophies of ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Stormfront and all stripes of white nationalism, as well as other fanatical groups, take the form of the resentment narrative.

Resentment narratives are powerful because they are emotionally satisfying and identity providing. They offer emotional satisfaction by enabling fanatics to transform their feelings of powerlessness, disaffection and malaise into a seething, hate-filled resentment that can be channelled outwardly into aggressive reactions toward others. And they are identity-providing because they give the fanatic a way of defining herself, albeit in a negative way: what’s most important to the fanatic is what they reject, despise, or fear. The resentment narrative says: that outgroup is evil, and you can define yourself as not that.

This creates an enduring state of conflict that brooks no resolution. If your very identity and sense of self are bound up in your grievances – in your opposition to an outgroup – what would motivate you to address any problems with that outgroup in a genuine way? Eliminating the conflict would extinguish your sense of who you are. You would have to find new conflicts, new grievances, new battles. Your opposition thus becomes a fixed point, something that you cannot let go. Indeed, as political and social tides ebb and flow, fanatical groups – such as those we’ve noted – identify new threats, adapt their lists of grievances, and distinguish new enemies and perceived slights, ensuring that the conflict will continue unabated.

These powerful, damaging resentment narratives have nearly unlimited potential to spread and infect – especially today, when social media and internet communication make it so easy for disaffected individuals to find and latch on to them. But if resentment narratives create fanatics, they also provide an obvious checkpoint: by blocking the spread of such stories, we might slow or prevent the spread of fanaticism. That’s easier said than done, of course; these identity-providing, emotionally satisfying stories give us something to be and something to fight for. People who feel rootless, purposeless, without direction; people who are dissatisfied, disaffected, downcast; people who see their lives as full of failings; these people want more. They crave exactly what the resentment narrative provides: purpose, direction, stability, a vindicatory self-conception. . . . 

Nietzsche argued that because the resentment narratives lack a rational foundation, and draw power mainly from the ardency of their devotees, they can be weakened by a shift in the cultural current. . . . In other words, while fanatical narratives can’t be undermined solely by rational objections, they can be undermined when we combine rational objections with an attempt to make the narratives seem absurd, laughable, comic, and opposed to important parts of human nature (for example by showing that it conflicts with some of our central motivations or aspirations). . . . 

The second strategy is more difficult, yet it is what Nietzsche most ardently yearned to achieve. Rather than trying to satisfy our craving for simplistic, totalising narratives and stable, unified identities, Nietzsche encouraged us to rid ourselves of those desires. He urged us to become free spirits – existentially flexible subjects who can devote ourselves to causes without rigidity, tolerating life’s uncertainties and frustrations, seeing ourselves as multiple, and finding grounds for self-affirmation. To do this, we would need to stop experiencing ambiguity and uncertainty as a threat; we would need to stop projecting our personal failings and dissatisfactions outward. The free spirit can ‘take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practised in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses.’ Tolerating danger, unthreatened by ambiguity, and able to maintain an affirmative self-conception without falling into simplistic dichotomies, the free spirit would not need to negate others in order to affirm herself.

I'm guessing the experience of everyday awe and being a "free spirit" are two sides of the same coin.

Another book I recently read--well, skimmed, to be fair--is The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds—Not Crushes—Your Soul by Brad Stulberg. My thoughts:

A book with good ideas expressed too breezily and simply for my taste. I would have liked more depth. Though I find his message a valuable one and recommend it as a quick read.

Stulberg identifies an attitude of Heroic Individualism that pervades our culture and has led to an epidemic of anxiety, loneliness, depression, and other types of deep dissatisfaction with life. He advocates here for a life focused on the principles of groundedness: acceptance, presence, patience, vulnerability, deep community, and movement.

Here are some snippets I've pulled out to capture his main ideas:

Acceptance - Progress in anything, large or small, requires recognizing, accepting, and starting where you are. Not where you want to be. Not where you think you should be. Not where others think you should be. But where you are. . . . Acceptance is key to happiness and performance in the now, and also to productive changes in the future. . . . "The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change."

Presence - It is about being fully here for what is in front of you. Focused attention, not distraction.

Patience - Patience neutralizes our inclination to hurry, rush, and overemphasize acute situations in favor of playing the long game.

Vulnerability - It is about being honest with yourself and others, even--and especially--when that means confronting perceived weaknesses and fears. . . . digging deep and exploring your inner experience: opening to the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly.

Deep Community - Heroic individualism's incessant drive to be "productive," "optimized," and "efficient" often crowds out time and energy otherwise spent forging close bonds, both to other people and to traditions, crafts, and lineages that provide a sense of belonging. The irony is that these close bonds not only make us feel better and make the world a better place, but the help us perform better, too.

Movement - Movement promotes generalized well-being, strength, and stability--not just in body but also in mind. . . . movement supports each of the other principles.

Focus on the process, let the outcomes take care of themselves. . . . Do not worry about achieving a specific result. Focus on being where you are and applying the principles of groundedness to the best of your ability right now. If you concentrate on the process, the results you are hoping for tend to take care of themselves.

In order to transition to a more grounded life, you may face resistance, both personal and cultural, especially since today's society--and the heroic individualism it espouses--is in opposition to cultivating and nourishing the principles of groundedness. We've become so consumed with superficial and external endpoints like greatness, immortality, and bliss--trying to hack our way to happiness, preoccupied with marginal gains, and obsessed with optimization--that we've forgotten to pay attention to the foundational principles that keep us healthy, solid, fulfilled, and strong.

Ideas that mesh well with everyday awe.

I simply want to preserve and share a bit of silliness I came up to post on FB the morning of the winter solstice.

The Earth wibbles,

the Earth wobbles . . . 

Quickly, now!

Everyone throw yourself

to the other side of the planet

so it rocks back the other way

and doesn't tip all the way

over.

Absurdity is a way I remind myself that life is something vast that transcends my current understanding of the world.

And parenting is often a good reminder of absurdity.

"You'll find it easier to brush your teeth if you pause your singing and then continue after."

Ah, such spontaneous pearls of wisdom I come up with helping the children get ready to leave the house in the morning.

As previously shared on FB.

Another poem.

Jeff McRae

JEOPARDY

And so if, when we are old and have lost interest

in things scholarly, and the children are living lives of their own,

what if we become what we strive now so hard to avoid?

Comforted by routine, scheduled by television programs.

What is: the morning coffee you brewed for years while I slept?

Who is: the woman that suffered all my abuses?

What are: the conditions of indebtedness?

And if when we have long since ceased using our proper names,

or your medical condition has me speaking again to God,

who never crossed the threshold of our house, what is:

I will not die first? Who is: the one most likely to better bear

the remaining days? Perhaps we’ll know the beauty of one thing.

Perhaps we will be left with the gift of a breath. A storm is coming.

One need only feel the air to know what lies within

the corpse-colored clouds. When you are young

and certain of your place in the palpable mystery of being

you begin with knowing. Then forgetting begins: forgetting

where you left your glasses (on your head), forgetting

when we first met (in a cold month long ago), forgetting even

what grace felt like (it felt like privilege). It occurs to you

how gently the rain rolls through the deltas of sand on the sidewalk.

What is: an evening of opposites? Who is: the owner

of this lilac-scented drawer of clothes? What are: the brief songs

of crickets? When the world trusts you it will reveal itself

in the language of repetition, in the forked tongue of instinct and culture,

with a stale breath of history. Until then you must learn to live

with small amounts of starvation, with want, with a lengthening list

of valid questions for which you deserve no answer.

—from Rattle #23, Summer 2005

Ah, mortality.

Not particularly relevant to the post today, just something too good not to share, is recent read Bea Wolf by Zach Weinersmith.

Brilliant! Just absolute genius. A hilarious retelling of Beowulf in graphic novel form. Echoing the original poetic language, alliteration, and style, with children as our heroes. Epic heroes, devoted to epic fun. Opposed by a fun-hating teacher named Mr. Grindle with the power to unnaturally age children into older, boring versions of themselves:

Ten kids turned teenaged, tired-eyed, ever-texting,
eight turned middle-aged, aching, anxious, angry at the internet.

Both words and pictures are endlessly inventive and entertaining. I'm planning to immediately take it home to read with my kids. Highest recommendation.

Should you want a longer sample, here a couple of sections; first the original (the Seamus Heaney translation), followed by the Bea Wolf counterparts:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.

There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
as his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.

-

Listen to the lives of the long-ago kids, the world-fighters
the parent-unminding kids, the improper, the politeness-proof,
the unbowed bully-crushers, the bedtime-breakers, the raspberry-blowers,
fighters of fun-killers, fearing nothing, fated for fame.

There was Tanya, treat-taker, terror of Halloween,
her costume-cache vast, sieging kin and neighbor,
draining full candy-bins, fearing not the fate of her teeth.
Ten thousand treats she took. That was a fine Tuesday.

-----

So, after nightfall, Grendel set out
for the lofty house, to see how the Ring-Danes
were settling into it after their drink,
and there he came upon them, a company of the best
asleep from their feasting, insensible to pain
and human sorrow. Suddenly then
the God-cursed brute was creating havoc:
greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men
from their resting places and rushed to his lair,
flushed up and inflamed from the raid,
blundering back with the butchered corpses.

Then as dawn brightened and the day broke,
Grendel's powers of destruction were plain:
their wassail was over, they wept to heaven
and mourned under morning. Their mighty prince,
the storied leader, sat stricken and helpless,
humiliated by the loss of his guard,
bewildered and stunned, staring aghast
at the demon's trail, in deep distress.

-

. . . Then came Grindle.
Scaling the high ladders of Treeheart, heedless of the hall-traps,
grown strong on seven-hour spells at his standing desk.
He unhinged the hall-door, hinting himself inside.
Caught by the killjoy's finger,
countless kids became crooked and hair-clad! . . .
Coldness caught the aspen castle. Quiet veiled the one-time party.
Grindle tiptoed down the tree, terrible in triumph,
Marauding his well-mown lawn, his might matchless,
teeth twinkling in the tarry dark, for twice a day did he floss.

Dawn rose, like a jerk. Light lapped Roger's eyes.
He crawled to the throne, now clad in stainproof coating,
the hall-builder, heartsore, beheld the fun-hater's home-work:
Treeheart lay ruined, wrecked by the woe-teacher's wrath.
The wall-timbers were touched up, the table topped with tablecloth,
toy-piles tidily stacked, sharp ones taken entirely.
In his kid-hatred, the carl-cursed fiend kept only cooperative games,
and many a bench lay buttless in the fun-barren fortress.

Awe-inspiring warriors, all.

In the same vein; and since the first book I shared today was a kids book by Daniel Kraus, here's his most recent for adults, Whalefall.

Wow! What a ride.

Everyone loved Mitt Gardiner, a crusty, self-reliant, friendly deep-sea diver with a reputation as one of the best. Everyone loved Mitt except his son, Jay, who only experienced him as a callous bully driven to force Jay into being a clone of himself. Jay fled home at 15 to escape Mitt, and stayed away as his father wasted away from cancer until throwing himself into the ocean to die. Now, 17-year-old Jay is hoping to get back into his family's good graces by retrieving his dad's bones from the bottom of Monterey Bay with a secret, possibly illegal, very dangerous dive, his first one in two years. It becomes an unimaginable experience.

Readers experience the wild thrill ride with Jay, as much about the emotional tumult as the physical happenings. Jay has the amazing luck of stumbling upon an Architeuthis, a giant squid, a one-in-a-million, unique encounter. But the squid is being hunted by a sperm whale, and Jay gets eaten right along with it. In the tight, dark whale's stomach, burned by digestive acids, halfway delirious from breathing methane, an undigested squid beak stabs through his hand. But he can use the beak to cut part of his neoprene diving suit into a bandage that will keep him from bleeding out. And to stab into the whale in the hopes it will regurgitate him. But the pain makes the whale dive in a panic, and Jay is going to be crushed from the water pressure. Then the whale suddenly stops, just in time to save Jay's life. Except it stopped because it's being attacked by a pod of orcas and will soon be killed and eaten. Back and forth, one incredible thing after another. Constant adrenaline and thrills. An emotional roller coaster.

Kraus is often a writer of the macabre and grotesque, and he spares no gory detail here. This book resembles Moby-Dick in its attention to the minutia of whale anatomy, except this is much grungier. Jay spends a good portion of the story in a fleshy tube that is trying to crush him, surrounded by blood and viscera of the whale's other victims; Jay's surroundings during other portions are just as gruesome. The writing is, indeed, visceral and vivid.

While these events are playing out, the real drama is taking place inside Jay's brain. He has knowledge that will help him survive, but to access it he must process his accumulated trauma, guilt, repressed memories, and tumultuous relationship with his dad. As much of the book takes place in the past as the present; Jay's journey into the dark depths is as much psychological as physical, and he has many monsters to fight.

This is an amazing tale in so many ways. Can't-put-down excitement combined with emotional rawness and honesty. Unique and fantastic.

A story full of awe.

That's why I think we--all of us--were put here on this world. To soothe one another's suffering. I did it by giving the Originals to people who needed them. But you can do it however you like. Through laughter. Through caring for the sick. Through cooking delicious snacks. Through snuggling, if you happen to be a teddy.