An elixir blend by A Tethered God to cultivate reverence beyond rationality. The blend helps us sit with the questions: How do we court the wild feeling of wonder, and how do we let it court us?
Contains: Sweet birch (Betula lenta) tincture extracted in organic gluten free vodka, fresh sap from white birch (Betula papyrifera), vibrational extraction of tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera)
1/2 oz dropper bottle
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Wonder is a shape of awe. In its modern configuration the word "awe" is derived from Middle English, borrowed from Old Norse agi, which originally denoted a feeling of fear or terror. The breadcrumbs of this etymology still remains in the dictionary definition of awe, which includes the interplay of both fear and reverence. In this reverence, I am reminded of what brings humans out to the other side of a hardship, of loss of faith, of compression of ourselves, our communities, our hopes, dreams, and expectations for our lives. Sometimes it's awe. We may associate awe and wonder with a kind of religious fervor or soaring cathedral mentality, but the times I have felt the closest to wonder are the times I've been the closest to death and decided to see what was on the other side of an exhale. These days, as the world continues to turn in death-allowing complexity, I'm reminded of what it feels like to hold that choosing.
In wonder, can we find an opening – a buoying, a buoyancy, a faith beyond current conditions, the ability to see beyond our own sight.
In wonder, I am reminded that humans have always found persistence not through power alone — but through release, through faith, through connection beyond rationality. I think of awe in the words of writer Barry Lopez –
“There is a word from the time of the cathedrals: agape, an expression of intense spiritual affinity with the mystery that is "to be sharing life with other life." Agape is love, and it can mean "the love of another for the sake of God." More broadly and essentially, it is a humble, impassioned embrace of something outside the self, in the name of that which we refer to as God, but which also includes the self and is God. We are clearly indebted as a species to the play of our intelligence; we trust our future to it; but we do not know whether intelligence is reason or whether intelligence is this desire to embrace and be embraced in the pattern that both theologians and physicists call God. Whether intelligence, in other words, is love.”
I ask for wonder to show us the same. I ask that our striving not be encased in one form, but influenced by our awe of it all - the holy opening, the talismanic agape.