Awe

Awe is what happens when reality exceeds what hope dared to imagine.

Sam Cooke wrote A Change Is Gonna Come in late 1963, partly in response to Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind and partly in response to being turned away from a whites-only motel in Louisiana with his family. The song emerged from that collision, the personal and the political, the wound and the aspiration. It became one of the most quietly powerful civil rights anthems ever recorded. “A change is gonna come, oh yes it will” is not a declaration of certainty. It is a declaration of faith in the face of all evidence to the contrary. It is awe as an act of resistance.

That faith is the emotional core of this painting.

Awe is unique among emotions because it requires the suspension of the self. In moments of genuine awe, before something vast, beautiful, or transcendent, the ego quiets. We step back. We become witnesses. Neuroaesthetics research confirms what Cooke seemed to understand intuitively: awe reshapes us, expands our sense of time, connects us to something larger than our individual circumstances. Wonder fuels the wish to understand. Awe fuels the wish to let what is greater than us simply shine.

The symbols carved into the rock-like formations of this work transcribe fragments of Cooke’s lyrics as enduring witness, words left behind by a man who was murdered in December 1964 at just 33, before he could see any of the change he sang into existence. His death remains one of the great unresolved tragedies in American musical history. And yet the song remains, as awe-inspiring as the morning it was recorded.

This piece asks: When did something last make you step back and simply witness?