Nature as a spiritual teacher: awe from the Amazon to the garden

The Short Version

Three very different people, a food writer and gardener, a jungle conservationist and an archaeologist of the ancient Americas, keep arriving at the same place: time spent close to living nature turns into something that looks a lot like reverence. Michael Pollan learned from Wendell Berry to treat his relationship with nature as "more like a marriage than a domination," and cites research showing that an awe experience in the outdoors, such as river rafting, shrinks people's sense of self [1]. Paul Rosolie, after 18 years in the Peruvian Amazon, talks about God, love and compassion in the same breath as bushmasters, caimans and water, and says "when you're that thirsty water becomes god" [2]. Ed Barnhart argues that religion in South America itself began in the Amazon, with a fanged creator deity built from jaguars, snakes and caimans [3]. Taken together, the sources suggest that wild places are one of the most reliable routes to awe, though Pollan adds an important twist: the garden, the everyday patch of nature you have to work with, can teach the same humility [1].

Table of contents

What They Said

Michael Pollan: from spectator to spouse

Pollan's route to reverence runs through the garden rather than the wilderness, and it begins with a problem. While writing his first book, Second Nature, he was "trying to figure out how to behave in the garden," which he calls "a microcosm of how do we behave in nature" [1]. He had pests, fertility problems and weeds, and the tradition he had absorbed in college and graduate school did not help. That tradition, he says, "goes back to Thoreau John Muir and Emerson is all about celebrating the wilderness and being a spectator in nature" [1]. The gardener, he points out, "can't afford to do that. You have to act or you're not going to have anything to eat" [1]. He even found Thoreau's advice absurd for a working gardener: "Thoreau's telling me weeds have just as much right to be in your garden as the bean plant, which is crazy" [1].

The way out came from Wendell Berry, the poet, farmer and essayist whose recent death at 92 opens Pollan's conversation with Andrew Huberman [1]. Berry, Pollan recalls, "convinced me, you know, he said, we have a legitimate quarrel with nature and that our relationship is, you know, we do have to make changes in nature for us to survive" [1]. Humans are "the species who remakes nature in various ways. But it has to be done sort of more like a marriage than a domination" [1]. This frame, Pollan says, "really helped me and clarified my whole view of environmentalism" [1]. He calls Berry "a great hero" [1].

The marriage metaphor matters for this Insight because it is a relational, almost spiritual, stance. A marriage implies two parties with their own interests, and Pollan says exactly that about his plants. Gardening, he explains, "puts you in relation to nature, an active relationship to nature. Most of us have a very kind of observer type relationship. We admire it from a distance on vacation, you know. But gardening thrust you right in the middle of it" [1]. And once you are in the middle of it, you learn "that your plants have interests. You know, you're not the only interested creature here. Your plants have interests. And to the extent you can satisfy their interests, they're going to give you what you're, what you want" [1].

His own story of falling for nature starts early. At four or five he buried a watermelon seed that grew into a football-sized melon, which he dropped and smashed while running to show his mother [1]. By about eight he had planted a garden beside the house that he called a "farm": "Whenever I could grow three or four strawberries, I put them in a Dixie cup and sell them to my mom. So it was a going concern" [1]. That childhood, he says, led years later to his first book [1].

Pollan's respect for plants goes beyond the garden gate. He took "a deep dive into this field of plant intelligence" and reports findings "that you would not have guessed" [1]. A corn plant's roots, given a maze with ammonium nitrate in one corner, "will find the fastest path to that ammonium nitrate," which he notes "takes a certain kind of intelligence, problem solving ability" [1]. Plants played the sound of caterpillars chewing will "send either toxins or bad tasting chemicals to that leaf to defend themselves," and roots will grow toward the sound of water running through a pipe [1]. "They have like 20 senses. We have five or six," he says [1]. Most striking, plants respond to the same anesthetics people do: a Venus flytrap exposed to xenon gas stops snapping shut on insects, which Pollan calls a loss of sentience [1]. He treats sentience, awareness of the environment and whether changes are good or bad, as something that may be a property of all life, and he warns against using the human version of consciousness as the yardstick for every creature [1].

He also turns the usual picture of who controls whom upside down. Following the theme of The Botany of Desire, he argues that plants have evolved to exploit human desires: corn spread by giving us what we wanted, cannabis spread worldwide because of THC, and compounds like caffeine probably began as defense chemicals [1]. The relationship, in other words, runs both ways, just as it does with the microbes we rely on for glutamate, GABA, serotonin and short-chain fatty acids [1].

Crucially for the question of awe, Pollan connects the experience of nature to the shrinking of the self. He points to his Berkeley colleague Dacher Keltner, who had people draw stick-figure self-portraits before and after an awe experience such as river rafting; afterward, they drew themselves at about a third of the size [1]. Pollan places awe alongside meditation and psychedelics as experiences that can shrink the ego [1]. He is candid that we need the self: "You wouldn't spend six years writing a book if you didn't know you were going to be the same person at the end of the six years" [1]. But "it's also a trap, and it distances us from people and makes us selfish" [1]. Some of our happiest moments come from escaping it: "It happens in sex. It happens experiences of awe, religious experience. It happens to people in church and synagogue all the time" [1]. That sentence puts awe and religious experience in the same list, which is the heart of this Insight's claim.

Pollan's openness has limits he sets himself. He credits his practical streak to being the oldest of four with an alcoholic father, and his instinct is to start with materialism and look at stranger ideas only if it fails [1]. Even so, he now takes seriously ideas he once dismissed, such as "filter theories in which the brain acts as a reducing valve admitting only the measly trickle" of consciousness we need to survive [1]. He notes that Christof Koch, a longtime materialist, became convinced after an ayahuasca experience that consciousness exists outside brains [1].

Paul Rosolie: God in the jungle

Where Pollan finds reverence in a vegetable bed, Paul Rosolie finds it in one of the wildest places on Earth. He recorded his second conversation with Lex Fridman at night, deep in the Peruvian Amazon, by candlelight, with insects and birds calling and at one point a snake crawling past their shoulders [2]. Rosolie, a naturalist, author of Mother of God and founder of Junglekeepers, has spent 18 years protecting rainforest along the Las Piedras River with indigenous conservationist Juan Julio Durand, known as JJ [2].

His picture of the jungle is not sentimental. They are in the western Amazon basin, where the Andes and cloud forests meet lowland rainforest, which he calls the most biodiverse part of the planet, not just today but in the entire fossil record [2]. The Amazon has been "described as the greatest natural battlefield on earth," because with so much life, everything competes for survival [2]. "The jungle is really just a giant churning machine of death and life is kind of this moment of stasis," he says [2]. Almost everything is defended, from giant anteaters' claws to stingrays' venomous tails to ferns with invisible spikes [2].

Yet his reverence survives, and even grows out of, that brutality. Nothing here, he insists, actually wants to get you, except perhaps the mosquitoes; animals just want to eat and live in peace [2]. The bushmaster, which he believes is the largest viper on Earth, made it clear when he once grabbed its tail at night that "if you want to meet God, I can arrange the meeting," and he let it go [2]. "There's no such thing as an aggressive snake once you get outside of anaconda and reticulated python," he says [2]. He calls caimans "peaceful dragons that sit on the side of the river," admires them as mega-survivors because "the crocodiles and the cockroaches have seen it all before," and calls rhinos "peaceful fat grass unicorns" [2]. A bull elephant is "an octopus faced butterfly eared behemoth that's a survival machine" [2]. The language is playful, but it is the language of wonder, the vocabulary of someone who keeps being astonished.

That wonder extends to what is not yet known. For most of the region's roughly 1,500 butterfly species, no one knows which host plants their caterpillars need, and nobody knows what the caterpillar of the white witch, the moth with the largest wingspan, looks like [2]. About half of rainforest life is in the canopy, which scientists have reached with ropes, slingshots and even hot-air balloons, and from the Junglekeepers treehouse the team is seeing lizards and snakes never recorded on the river [2]. The jungle is full of partnerships: ant plants with built-in hollows house ants that attack anything touching the tree and clear a perfect circle around it, which Rosolie calls a source of existential confusion [2]. Macaws pair for life because they depend on scarce nest holes in ironwood trees often 500 years old or more [2].

His reverence also shows in how he treats animals he kills. He contrasts natural brutality with human cruelty, such as a man who cut the tail off a live stingray for bait and threw it back [2]. By contrast, when the staff were hungry and out of supplies, he fished for pacu at dawn with a friend and held the fish with reverence [2]. He grieves over a black caiman he found killed with a machete and left uneaten, likely by outsiders, since locals either eat an animal or leave it alone [2].

The most direct link between wild places and the sacred came from hardship. Rosolie and Fridman got lost off-trail, in dense jungle, without water. Off trail, "every step is a puzzle," with hidden holes, rotten logs, wasp nests, bullet ants and spiked trees [2]. Fridman, crouched washing his shirt in a puddle, said, as Rosolie recalls, "the only thing that I care about right now is water" [2]. Rosolie adds: "when you're that thirsty water becomes god" [2]. When they finally reached a river at night during a thunderstorm, they sat in it up to their necks to stay warm, laughing as moths swirled in their headlamps, and Fridman calls it one of the happiest moments of his life [2]. Rosolie admits in hindsight that getting lost on purpose was reckless, since a broken leg would have meant days from help [2].

For Rosolie, the jungle simply makes more sense than the city: when it rains you get in the river, and you know you're protecting trees, while landing at JFK he feels like a frightened animal [2]. He suggests that some modern ideas come from being cut off from nature. On simulation theory he says: "notice that nobody carrying an alpaca up a mountain thinks that we're living inside of a video game," suggesting the idea comes from people living in climate-controlled boxes, far from what's real [2]. On aliens, he argues that talk of other planets can excuse us from protecting this one, and he calls the rainforests the crown jewel of the pale blue dot [2].

His faith is explicit. He is not afraid of death, believing in a benevolent creator, even though "I think most likely I'll get whacked by loggers" [2]. He sees nature's brutality as chaos, and humans as the ones able to organize toward order and light [2]. On God, he believes "the game is love and compassion," that life may be a test of whether we can be good, and that religions are cultural expressions of the same truth [2]. He loves Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain and the idea that Christ, Buddha and Muhammad were all teachers of love [2]. When Fridman argues for alien civilizations, Rosolie wonders whether aliens and angels might be the same thing, and tells him, "your aliens are my angels" [2].

His ayahuasca experience in the jungle also took a nature-centred form. He describes the brain as a house with hidden rooms, some wonderful and some terrifying; under the brew he became a nameless jungle creature, saw the animals gathered to discuss the threat of fire destroying the forest, and then endured what felt like years of crushing silence in space [2]. He stresses that it is not recreational [2]. He also notes the local belief that the ayahuasca recipe, combining one vine with one plant among tens of thousands, was revealed by the gods rather than found by trial and error [2].

Ed Barnhart: the jungle as the source of Andean religion

Barnhart, an archaeologist who directs the Maya Exploration Center, adds deep time to the pattern. His claim is not about personal experience but about where whole religions came from. He believes religion in South America began in the Amazon, which has the oldest pottery in the Americas [3]. The early coastal sites of Caral and Aspero show almost no religious art [3]. But around 1800 BCE the Chavin culture arises at a temple between the Amazon and the coast, and it is covered with jaguars, snakes and caimans, the animals of the jungle [3]. These are the same creatures Rosolie spends his nights among [2].

His signature, and admittedly controversial, idea is that one creator deity runs through Andean religion: a humanoid with round goggle eyes, fangs, clawed hands and feet, and snakes coming off his head and belt, who in later cultures carries severed human heads [3]. Early archaeologists, expecting pantheons like those of Greece or Egypt, labeled many separate gods, such as a crab deity or fox deity, but Barnhart sees the same face manifesting through different animals, much as Zeus took many forms [3]. He traces this figure from Chavin through Moche, Nazca, Wari and Tiwanaku to the Inca's Viracocha, who by then was treated as unknowable [3]. In other words, the sacred in the Andes was, for thousands of years, expressed through the faces of rainforest animals.

The idea likely spread through pilgrimage sites like Chavin, where offerings in labyrinths beneath the pyramids show people arriving from the coast and the Amazon [3]. The deity was not only fearsome. In Moche art he is involved in healing ceremonies, including ritual sex scenes where a priest's face transforms into his, and he has a puppy that dances at his feet [3]. Barnhart says he would now add music to his old list of sex, puppies and headhunting in Moche shamanism, since healers use it to call spirits [3].

Plants from the forest were part of this religious world. Healers today use San Pedro cactus on the coast and ayahuasca in the Amazon to see the spirit world [3]. Barnhart describes a 3,000-year-old wall at Chavin, facing the Amazon approach, carved with faces transforming from human to jaguar, some with snot streaming from their noses, which he links to ayahuasca snuff blown up the nose [3]. He believes hallucinogens could have been a real catalyst for civilization in South America, noting that most truly hallucinogenic plants originally came from the Americas [3]. Other cultures reached visions the hard way: the Maya used sleep deprivation, starvation and heavy bloodletting, and many peoples of the Americas saw these near-death states as entering the other world [3].

Barnhart's broader work shows the same pattern of nature feeding the sacred. The Maya saw the sky as proof that life is cyclical and watched the seven bodies that move against the fixed stars [3]. Their oldest calendar, the 260-day count, is still used by millions of Maya, and many say it reflects human gestation; Barnhart finds it beautiful that "no other culture on the planet looked inside themselves to create their calendar" [3]. Maya today say "cycles are a time of renewal and transformation" [3]. Even the flood myths found almost everywhere have, in his view, a natural origin: "it's the end of the ice age when the bathtub filled back up" [3].

He also shows how powerfully nature shapes and erases cultures. Any Amazonian civilization, he expects, will not look like Rome: with stone buried deep, people built with dirt, trees, feathers and textiles, and rivers rise over a hundred feet a year [3]. He and Fridman agree nature can erase whole societies over centuries [3]. For Amazonian peoples, he says, the forest is a paradise of food once you learn to survive it, so there is little pressure to change [3], an observation that echoes JJ's view, relayed by Rosolie, that the Amazon is a green paradise full of turtle eggs, grubs and fish rather than a "green hell" [2].

Barnhart is careful about the limits of what his discipline can prove. "Ideas are more powerful than weapons, but archaeology can't see them at all," he says [3]. His teacher Linda Schele warned him that "if you don't stop thinking like a Western European and start trying to put yourself in the mindset of these people you will never understand any of it" [3]. He also holds himself to disproving his own theories, while noting that every paradigm-shifting idea "began as heresy and lunacy" [3].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

Agreement: nature is more than scenery

All three treat the natural world as something with its own life, interests and intelligence, not as a backdrop. Pollan insists "Your plants have interests" and describes plants with around 20 senses that solve mazes and respond to anesthetics [1]. Rosolie describes elephants that communicate with seismic vibrations, remember ancestral maps to water, have burial rituals and even a code of ethics, and he believes they deserve representation in government [2]. Barnhart describes ancient Andean peoples who saw their single creator god in the faces of jaguars, snakes and caimans [3]. In each case, taking nature seriously as a partner or presence is what opens the door to reverence.

All three also connect nature to the loosening of the self. Pollan cites Keltner's finding that people draw themselves about a third smaller after an awe experience like river rafting, and groups awe with religious experience as moments when we escape the self [1]. Rosolie's jungle ordeal reduced everything to one need, to the point where water "becomes god," and his ayahuasca vision turned him into a nameless jungle creature [2]. Barnhart describes carved faces at Chavin turning from human into jaguar, and plant medicines used to enter the spirit world [3].

And all three link plants from the forest to altered, sometimes spiritual, states. Huberman raises with Pollan the view of "people who spend time in the jungle, who spent time with plant medicines" that plants "can sense us and that they're communicating with us," while admitting "I know this sounds really wacky" [1]. Rosolie relays the local belief that the ayahuasca recipe was revealed by the gods [2]. Barnhart suggests hallucinogens may have been a catalyst for civilization in South America [3].

Disagreement: wilderness or the backyard?

The sharpest tension is over where reverence is best found. Rosolie's life is a wager on the wild: he feels the jungle makes more sense than the city, and suggests that people in climate-controlled boxes lose touch with what's real [2]. Barnhart's evidence points to the Amazon as the cradle of Andean religion [3]. Both fit the idea that wild places are a privileged route to the sacred.

Pollan, by contrast, is openly skeptical of a nature ethic built only on wilderness. The Thoreau-Muir-Emerson tradition, he says, makes us spectators, and "the gardener can't afford to do that" [1]. He argues that learning to behave well on the more than 90% of land that is not protected wilderness matters as much as preserving wild places [1]. His reverence is earned by digging, weeding and negotiating with plants, not by standing on a ridge. So while Pollan supports the claim that nature inspires reverence, he would push back on the idea that it must be wild nature. The two positions are less opposed than they look, though: Keltner's awe example is river rafting, an outdoor, wild-ish experience [1], and Rosolie's own reverence comes from daily, hands-on work, catching snakes, fishing for pacu, protecting trees, rather than distant admiration [2]. What both reject is the spectator stance.

Disagreement: how literal is the sacred?

The three also differ on what the reverence means. Rosolie is a believer: he trusts a benevolent creator, sees religions as cultural expressions of one truth, and suspects aliens and angels may be the same thing [2]. Pollan starts from materialism and only explores stranger ideas when it fails, though he now takes filter theories and panpsychism more seriously than before [1]. Barnhart describes religion as an archaeologist, tracing a deity through iconography, while admitting that a woo-woo part of him would like to believe in astrology even though as a scientist he can't find a basis for it [3]. So the pattern of nature inspiring reverence holds across belief and skepticism alike, which arguably makes it stronger: it doesn't depend on any one theology.

Disagreement: the dark side of the jungle

Finally, the sources do not paint nature as gentle. Rosolie calls it a "churning machine of death" and sees nature's brutality as chaos that humans must organize toward order and light [2]. Barnhart's fanged deity carries severed human heads in later cultures, and he describes cycles of violence among some uncontacted groups, saying "it's a daily choice we make not to be savages" [3]. Pollan's marriage metaphor itself admits a "legitimate quarrel with nature" [1]. The reverence these sources describe is closer to awe in its old sense, part wonder and part fear, than to comfort.

Why It Works

The sources offer a handful of mechanisms, some tested and some speculative.

Awe shrinks the self. The clearest piece of evidence is Keltner's study as Pollan describes it: after an awe experience such as river rafting, people drew their stick-figure self-portraits at about a third of their earlier size [1]. Pollan places this alongside meditation and psychedelics as ways to reduce the ego, and he notes that escaping the self is part of "experiences of awe, religious experience" [1]. If religious feeling involves a smaller self in a larger world, then wild places, which dwarf us, are a natural trigger.

Seeing nature as having interests changes the relationship. Pollan's point is that gardening forces you to recognize "you're not the only interested creature here" [1]. His plant-intelligence examples, maze-solving roots, defensive responses to the sound of chewing caterpillars, roughly 20 senses, and sensitivity to anesthetics, push the same way: they make plants into beings rather than objects [1]. Rosolie does the same for animals, reframing snakes, caimans and anacondas as misunderstood survivors and elephants as a sibling species with ethics and burial rituals [2]. Once other creatures have interests, humility and respect follow.

Hardship strips life to essentials. Rosolie and Fridman's ordeal without water reduced everything to one need: "the only thing that I care about right now is water" [2]. Relief, sitting in a river during a thunderstorm, became one of Fridman's happiest moments [2]. Rosolie's phrase "when you're that thirsty water becomes god" suggests that dependence on nature, felt in the body, is itself a religious feeling [2]. Pollan's research interests offer a possible link: he was persuaded that consciousness begins with homeostatic feelings like hunger and warmth in the upper brainstem, and that separating mind and body sends us down the wrong path [1].

The animals themselves become symbols. Barnhart's archaeology shows the jungle's most powerful creatures, jaguars, snakes and caimans, becoming the face of a single creator deity that spread through pilgrimage sites and lasted from Chavin to the Inca [3]. Rainforest creatures are dangerous, beautiful and larger than life, exactly what Rosolie calls "peaceful dragons" and a "survival machine" [2], so it makes sense that people living among them would see the divine in them.

Forest plants alter consciousness. Several sources point to plant medicines as a bridge from nature to the sacred. Barnhart links the human-to-jaguar faces at Chavin to ayahuasca snuff and suggests hallucinogens may have catalyzed civilization in South America [3]. Rosolie's ayahuasca vision filled with jungle animals worried about fire [2]. Pollan describes high-dose psilocybin dissolving his ego and leaving him with lasting perspective on when his ego is "up to his old tricks" [1]. These are not the same as simply walking in the woods, and they carry risks, but they show why many cultures tied the forest to the spirit world.

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

It applies to hands-on contact, not just viewing. Pollan's whole argument is that admiring nature "from a distance on vacation" is an observer relationship, while gardening "thrust you right in the middle of it" [1]. Rosolie's reverence grows from years of active work, not tourism [2]. The pattern suggests that involvement, not scenery, is what breeds reverence.

It applies in the garden as well as the jungle. The Insight's framing favors wild places, and Rosolie and Barnhart support that [2][3]. But Pollan's experience shows that a backyard plot, even a strawberry "farm" at age eight, can teach the same lesson that plants have interests and that our relationship with nature should be a marriage [1]. He stresses that more than 90% of land isn't protected wilderness, so how we behave there matters as much [1]. For people without access to the Amazon, this is the more practical path.

It does not mean nature is safe or kind. Rosolie describes being bitten to the bone by a caiman, nearly beaten against a riverbed by another, and crushed by an anaconda until JJ pulled him out [2]. He admits getting lost on purpose was reckless, since a broken leg would have left them days from help that couldn't find them [2]. Barnhart describes the Amazon as a paradise of food only once you learn to survive it [3]. Awe in wild places comes with real danger, and no source recommends seeking it recklessly.

Plant medicines are a separate and riskier matter. Although ayahuasca and San Pedro run through these stories [2][3], Pollan stresses that psychedelics carry real risks, pointing to what is being learned about cannabis, addiction and psychosis, and says some people should stay away from them entirely and the public will need a lot of education [1]. Rosolie says ayahuasca is not recreational and describes terrifying parts of his experience [2]. Anyone considering these substances should talk with a qualified medical professional first, especially if they have a history of mental health problems.

The historical claim is contested. Barnhart himself calls his single fanged creator deity controversial, and notes that early archaeologists saw many separate gods where he sees one [3]. He also warns that archaeology "can't see" ideas at all [3]. So the evidence that Andean religion has Amazonian roots is a strong, reasoned hypothesis, not settled fact.

Awe does not remove the need for a self. Pollan cautions that the self is needed to get things done, like writing a book over six years, and that is why he doubts simple ideas of collective consciousness [1]. Nature's ego-shrinking effect is a corrective, not a replacement for a working sense of who you are.

The sources give one study, not many. The only research on awe itself in these conversations is Keltner's stick-figure study as Pollan relays it [1]. The rest is personal experience, cultural history and archaeology [2][3]. The pattern is striking and consistent, but the claim that wild places are one of the most reliable routes to awe rests mainly on testimony and history rather than controlled comparison.

What To Do With It

1. Swap spectating for participating. Instead of only admiring nature on vacation, find a way to act in it, as Pollan urges: gardening "puts you in relation to nature, an active relationship to nature" [1]. Even a few strawberry plants, like his childhood "farm," count [1].

2. Treat your patch of nature like a marriage. Following Wendell Berry via Pollan, accept that you will change nature to live, but do it "more like a marriage than a domination": ask what the plants and soil need, not just what you want from them [1].

3. Seek out experiences that make you feel small. Keltner's participants drew themselves about a third smaller after river rafting [1]. Choose outings, a river trip, a big forest, a night sky, that dwarf you, and notice whether your worries shrink with your sense of self.

4. Learn what you're looking at. Rosolie's reverence is built on knowledge: snakes that sense the air with their tongues, macaws that pair for life because of 500-year-old ironwood nest holes, ants that clear circles around their host trees [2]. Pollan's awe for plants grew from a deep dive into plant intelligence [1]. Learn a few facts about the living things near you; wonder grows with understanding.

5. Let necessity teach you, safely. Rosolie and Fridman found that thirst made water feel like god and that reaching a river was one of the happiest moments of Fridman's life [2]. You don't need to get lost to feel this: a long hike where you carry your own water, done with proper preparation, can reconnect you with basics. Don't copy their deliberate getting lost, which Rosolie himself calls reckless [2].

6. Handle what nature gives you with respect. Rosolie contrasts the man who mutilated a live stingray with holding a pacu caught for hungry staff "with reverence" [2], and notes that locals either eat an animal or leave it alone [2]. When you fish, harvest or garden, take only what you need and treat it with care.

7. Look at old religious art with the animals in mind. Barnhart's reading of Chavin shows how jaguars, snakes and caimans became the face of a creator god [3]. Visiting museums or reading about how ancient peoples saw the divine in animals can deepen your own sense of why nature feels sacred, as long as you follow Schele's advice to try to think from inside their mindset rather than your own [3].

8. Support the wild places that still exist. Rosolie calls rainforests the crown jewel of the pale blue dot and was moved by a single mother giving five dollars a month who said, "I saw how a few million raindrops can create a flood" [2]. Small, regular support for conservation keeps these routes to awe open for others.

9. Tell hopeful stories about nature. Pollan believes if there's any way to put hope in a story, you need to put hope in a story, and saw his refusal to cut paragraphs on grass-fed beef lead readers to ask their butcher for it [1]. Share what moved you outdoors in a way that invites others to go.

10. Keep plant medicines out of the casual toolkit. If the connection between forest plants and spiritual experience draws you, remember Pollan's warning about real risks and the need for education, and Rosolie's insistence that ayahuasca is not recreational [1][2]. Speak with a medical professional before considering anything of the kind; walking, gardening and rafting carry the awe without those risks.

Sources

1. Michael Pollan on Consciousness, Plant Intelligence, Psychedelics, and Caffeine · Huberman Lab
2. Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God · Lex Fridman Podcast
3. Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America · Lex Fridman Podcast