The Nature Fix

In The Nature Fix, author Florence Williams surveyed many historical figures’ attempts to summarize the experience I had that day in the woods with the Orange Peel Fungus. She discussed how eighteenth-century Irish philosopher, Edmund Burke, posited that “feelings of spirituality don’t just spring from religion: they also spring from transcendent experiences in nature…According to Burke, for something to be truly awe-inspiring, it must possess the ‘vastness of extent’ as well as a degree of difficulty in our ability to make sense of it. That awe also inspires feelings of humility and a more outward perspective has been well described by philosophers, priests and poets.” There was definitely something special about the experience of perceiving something to be a known object and then having to make space in my mind for the fact that it was something totally different, mysterious, and interesting. I had put my finger on the emotion I was experiencing when I first spotted the Orange Peel Fungus, but I wondered how I could keep feeling that kind of awe and how I could preserve the positive side effects.