Finding Awe with Dr. Demond Hill

all creeped up on me.

I had an opportunity to do my PhD at Berkeley, at UC Berkeley.

And while I was there, I was originally focused on education as a whole.

While I was at Berkeley, I seen this man walking on campus.

It was Dr. Keltner.

And Dr. Dr. Keltner is in a lot of ways considered the all guy.

He studies it.

He's been doing incredible work in the area.

Through relationships, he ended up being a primary mentor of mine.

While I was thinking broadly about a number of emotions, a number of feelings as it relates to our children, my work is primarily a little bit more on the side of joy and shame and guilt and embarrassment, and other emotions are part of that.

However, the work in just rubbing shoulders with Dr. Keltner made me start to consider and think deeply about awe itself.

One of the things I wanted to play with is I had an opportunity to go to a particular part of San Francisco that has an incredibly beautiful view.

Every day I drove there, I was in awe.

Didn't have the language for it.

Anytime I would have small, one-off conversations with the children, as they're jumping off of the trees, swinging from the swings, as the water is behind them, joyous didn't have a word to capture that.

Awe consistently came up for me.

The unique thing, though, that I thought about was, does awe really live here, or am I making it live here? And in that, that is where my work has gravitated towards.

What does all look like in the spaces and places that could be considered, with all of the research out there, spaces that all does not exist, that all cannot flourish in? And I wanted on one end to prove that it does and to show where and how it looks.

And on the other end, I wanted to highlight what structurally is occurring in particular at the micro and macro level that are in ways tarnishing, damaging, stripping the experiences of all in communities.

How do you define awe, and how do you distinguish it from joy or gratitude? Dr.

Keltner would say awe has a vastness.

It's an experience that opens you, that pops, in my way, the bubble.

I mean, that bubble could be, in a lot of ways, for folks, the capitalistic, patriarchal, white supremacist bubble.

It bursts the joy, in my opinion, although closely related, Joy has, to me, a different type of feel and texture to it.

So while awe in my mind can come with a stuckness, your mouth drops on the floor, your eyes get big, your breath slows down, you are one with, as we always talked about, you kind of get lost in the beauty around you, or you get lost In a lot of ways, in a lot of my stories, potentially life and death.