Paths of Wonder: Islands, Awe, and Everyday Life

How travel, art, and small choices help us keep seeing the world with fresh eyes.

Jan 22, 2026

As January begins to wind down, many of us are fully “back to business” with emails, meetings, and navigating frozen sidewalks. We may also be embracing the hibernation of overwintering as we carry larger questions from the new year, including: What do I want this next stretch of life to feel like? This week is an invitation to treat awe not as a luxury, but as a practical, renewable resource you can cultivate right where you are.

A quiet roadside companion: one of the island’s working stories still walking the present.

Island layers, rainbow endings

We flew back to New England amidst frozen flurries late last night, after time on a small island far to the south, celebrating a special birthday.

Most mornings my traveling companion (a.k.a husband) and I ran together along the unpaved road toward the northern shoreline. At first it felt like pure present tense: sun on our shoulders, wind in our faces, the simple rhythm of footfalls and breath. Then, as often happens when we repeat a route, details began to surface.

Low scrub opened to flashes of bright water. Weathered buildings stood quiet, long after the work that animated them had ended. Former “must-have” infrastructure such as a post-World War II era Coast Guard LORAN station now sat in salt air and silence. It made me wonder how quickly “essential” can become “forgotten,” and how the land keeps going, indifferent and luminous.

We happened upon free-roaming donkeys that once labored for the salt trade, now moving with the calm assurance of animals who belong. At low tide, we found sea stars resting in warm, shallow pools, waiting for the water to return. Their stillness seemed less like helplessness and more like a kind of built-in patience.

On our penultimate run, a small rainbow arced out over the water to the west underneath the parting clouds. Not the dramatic, full-sky kind—just a brief, bright curve that felt like the island’s quiet goodbye.

Back home, the contrast is sharp: cold air, angled sun, bare branches, snow along the Maine shoreline and more to come this weekend. Yet the practice is the same.

Notice what remains.
Notice what returns.
Notice what is missing, and let that missingness make you more careful with the stories you collect, curate and convey.

Earlier this winter, during Artful Escapes: Islands That Might Surprise You at the Portland Art Gallery, we explored islands as places of curiosity, how they reshape our sense of “normal,” and invite us to see with fresh eyes. This recent travel felt like another chapter in that same conversation.

This is How We Navigate the Islands by Rick Hamilton

Awe, “everyday wonder,” and the small self

Psychologist Dacher Keltner describes awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” He and his colleagues have found that people most often experience awe not on mountaintops, but in the ordinary flow of days: a friend’s courage, a passage of music, a shaft of light through trees, the quiet presence of another human being.

In his research, people typically described awe when experiencing one of eight wonders of life:

moral beauty (witnessing courage, kindness, or strength),
collective effervescence (feeling lifted by a group),
nature,
music,
visual design,
spirituality and religion,
life and death,
epiphany.

Keltner notes that awe nudges us out of what he calls the “default self:” the part of us that is always tracking status, accomplishment, and competitive advantage. When this default mode runs the show, anxiety, rumination, and comparison tend to rise. Awe quiets that voice, even briefly, and reminds us we belong to something larger.

“Awe is about our relation to the vast mysteries of life.”
— Dacher Keltner, Awe

The good news is that awe is not rare. In daily-diary studies, people reported feeling it two to three times a week, often in small, unexpected ways. We can increase those chances by doing simple things: getting outdoors, paying attention to light and sound, and being open to other people’s stories.

Travel can amplify this, because more of what we encounter is new. But the core skill is portable. It comes home with us.

Travel and shared attention

Traveling with someone else changes what we see.

On the island, my traveling companion noticed things I might have missed: a different running path to the top of the hill and the way that buildings were constructed to capture the movement of the sun. I drew his attention to the calls of the Bahama Mockingbird, Black-necked Stilt and Smooth-billed Ani. We each saw different versions of the sunset over the cove.

Together, we brought different strengths to the journey: navigation here, logistics there, curiosity throughout. Together, our shared attention created a richer map than either of us could have drawn alone.

This shared noticing is one of the reasons I continue to love the Artful Escapes series and our other gallery gatherings. When people come together to talk about travel, art, and place, we get to borrow one another’s perspectives. Someone else’s “ordinary” becomes your moment of awe.

Everyday awe in art and design: Radio Maine with Marnie Girado

This week on Radio Maine, we speak with Marnie Girado, Fair Manager and Exhibitor Relations specialist for the Affordable Art Fair NYC & Boston. Marnie studied art history at Bowdoin and the Courtauld Institute in London, with a focus on Victorian and Edwardian interiors—periods where almost everything in a painting, from flower choice to fabric, was symbolic.

Today, she uses that deep love of context to help make contemporary art more accessible. We talked about:

how transparent pricing and thoughtful booth design can reduce intimidation for new collectors,
the kinds of work people gravitate toward in Boston versus New York,
and the many career paths in art beyond being an artist or working in a museum.

If you’ve ever walked into a gallery or fair and thought, “I love this, but is it for me?” this conversation offers a different, more welcoming frame.

The Bountiful Path grows through shared voices. If this piece spoke to you, pass it along—each reader helps keep the circle whole.

Off the Wall: Dan Daly and the sacred ordinary

In this week’s Off the Wall piece, we feature Portland Art Gallery artist Dan Daly. Dan carries a sketchbook almost everywhere he goes, filling it with streets, harbors, porches, and quiet corners of New England life.

“I like to do pictures that someone can return to… that say someone cared enough to record this moment.”
— Dan Daly

He has taught in colleges and at the Maine State Prison, where some of his students created their first real artwork as adults. For many, that act of drawing or painting opened a door to self-respect and connection.

Dan’s paintings remind us that awe doesn’t always announce itself with fireworks. Sometimes it’s a porch light at dusk, a familiar tree, or the outline of a camp across the water: a common thing, done uncommonly well.

My Camper By The River, Evening by Dan Daly — My Camper by the River, Evening by Dan Daly

Awe and a “lopsided” life

In this week’s Radio Maine solo episode, “Lopsided Life,” we reflect on the myth of perfect balance and what it means to keep rebalancing instead.

There were seasons when my life tilted heavily toward medicine, others toward parenting, writing, or creative work. Rarely did everything feel even. What I eventually realized is that balance is less a fixed state and more an ongoing practice of attending to what matters most in this moment.

Awe can help here.

When we feel pressed between obligations, we often shrink into the default self: Am I doing enough? Am I keeping up?Awe invites a different question: What is quietly vast and meaningful in front of me right now? That might be a patient’s courage, a colleague’s kindness, your child’s laughter, or the way winter light spills across your desk.

If you’d like to explore this more, you can listen to our bite-sized episode here:

Collective effervescence, close to home: Why this may matter for you

If awe quiets the default self, collective effervescence is one of the ways it does so in community. Keltner uses this term, following sociologist Émile Durkheim, to describe the charged, joyful feeling of being part of a group that’s fully alive, such as a choir rehearsal, a great conversation, or a roomful of people leaning toward the same idea.

Travel, gallery openings, our Artful Escapes evenings, and even shared runs can all be sites of this kind of energy. So can intentional gatherings closer to home.

If you’re local, I hope you’ll consider joining us for the next Radio Maine Live evening at the Portland Art Gallery: an in-person space designed for conversation, reflection, and the simple joy of being in a room with others who care about creativity and meaning. Details are below.

If Bountiful Path has a central question, it might be this: How do we place ourselves where awe can find us more often?

Your turn: Pause + Reflect
This week, I invite you to experiment:
Name one everyday “awe place” in your current life.
It might be a shoreline, a trail, your kitchen table at a certain hour, or a particular patient room, classroom, or meeting space where people often surprise you with their courage or kindness.
Give it five extra minutes.
Sometime in the next few days, linger there just a little longer than usual. Put your phone away. Let your mind widen. Notice color, sound, and the people (or birds, or trees) around you.
Tell someone.
Share what you noticed—with a friend, a colleague, or by commenting on this post. Often, naming awe aloud helps us recognize it more easily the next time.

Discussion about this post

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