Phosphorescence: On Awe, Wonder and Things That Sustain You When the World Goes Dark

There are few things as startling as encountering an unearthly glow in the wild. Glow-worms. Ghost mushrooms. Fireflies. Flashlight fish. Lantern sharks. Vampire squid. Our forest floors and ceilings, our ocean depths and fringes are full of luminous beings, creatures lit from the inside. And they have, for many centuries, enchanted us, like glowing missionaries of wonder, emissaries of awe. Is there anything more beautiful than living light?

All the early stages took place in water: the origin of life; the birth of animals, the evolution of nervous systems and brains, and the appearance of complex bodies that makes brains worth having [...] When animals did crawl onto dry land, they took the sea with them. All the basic activities of life occur in water-filled cells bounded by membranes, tiny containers whose insides are remnants of the sea.

In greeting each morning remind yourself of Dadirri by blessing yourself with the following; "Let tiny drops of stillness fall gently through my day".

She just wants the world to know she was a hurricane and not a zephyr.

In Australia, the dawn is an arsonist who pours petrol along the horizon, throws a match on it and watches it burn.

Seek awe and nature daily... show kindness; practise grace; eschew vanity; be bold; embrace friends, family, faith and doubt, imperfection and mess; and live deliberately.

In short: when we are exposed to sunlight, trees, water or even just a view of green leaves, we become happier, healthier and stronger. People living in green spaces have more energy and a stronger sense of purpose, and being able to see green spaces from your home is associated with reduced cravings for alcohol, cigarettes and harmful foods.

The sublime Academy Award winning actor, Halle Berry, told a group of reporters in London in 2004 when she was promoting Cat Woman, "Being thought of as a beautiful woman has spared me nothing in life. No heartache, no trouble. Love has been difficult. Beauty is essentially meaningless and it is always transitory".

EVERY NOW AND THEN you actually do encounter someone who glows: someone who radiates goodness and seems to effortlessly inhabit a kind of joy, or seems so hungry for experience, so curious and engaged and fascinated with the world outside their head that they brim with life, or light. These people are simultaneously soothing and magnetic.

When our days are shadowed and leached of meaning, when circumstances shower us with mud, how can we be sure to re-emit lessons we absorb in the sunlight?

It can take a while, sometimes, to be the woman you want to be, and to excavate the misogyny or critical eye we too often internalise

Grace is not about ignoring the reality of a situation. It is about choosing to respond with kindness, with love, and with a quiet dignity, even when every instinct tells you to lash out or despair.

There is a beautiful, quiet strength in simply holding your ground, in continuing to do what is right and good when the world around you is spinning out of control.

McCarthy insists if we delight in nature and find joy there, we will not so carelessly plunder, neglect and destroy it. He calls it 'defence through joy'.

Findings revealed Type As focus on how proud they are and [how] impressed others are, but are only moderately to weakly involved in actively seeing positive memories for later recall, or in reminiscing about prior positive events.

Instead, I just prayed to God. And I think

While so much of our self-exploration today is hash-tagged #wellness and performed for all to see, it became obvious to me in the far reach of sacred lands, encircled by campfires and eucalypts, that sometimes the best way to pay attention to country is to keep your mouth shut, open your eyes and just listen.

Know this, too: You deserve love. Real, enduring love. Buckets of it. Love is the greatest high on Earth. But remember Proverbs 4:23: “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.

Dacher Keltner and Jonathain Haidt wrote: ‘Two appraisals are central and are present in all clear cases of awe: perceived vastness, and a need for accommodation, defined as an inability to assimilate an experience into current mental structures.

stranglehold on women in my conservative hometown of Sydney was tightening. Young girls brimming with hormones were warned not to tempt men with the way we dressed. We were told to marry young and submit to our husbands. We were cautioned against the distraction of social justice, about the evils of ambition, the selfishness of career, the ugliness of feminism. There was a puritanical bent to much of the controlling advice; the need for women to be modest, how just holding hands could be a gateway to sex. I was spoken to once because I had danced for several hours at a party, which was, apparently, evidence of my ‘love of the pleasures of this world’. But the worst thing a woman could be, a friendly leader told me, was opinionated.

I was trying to challenge the Sydney Anglican Church’s oppression of women, a church I had begun attending with my family when I was ten. This was a church that still told women to be silent, to not speak when men were present, to submit to male authority. A church that tried to rebrand and prettify patriarchy, to pretend it was not ancient but countercultural, resisting the sinful pull of modern feminism. A church many of my friends fled. For those who stayed, there was comfort and community but often a cost — one uniquely talented friend told me when she accepted her husband’s proposal that she had somehow prayed away her sin of ambition.