I have been away for a week, taking a vacation with my 17-year-old son. We traveled down to Rhode Island to visit with my daughter and take in some of the Guilded Age mansions in Newport, then off to the edge of Western Lake Ontario to spend a couple of days at the Sterling Renaissance Festival. We ended by driving over to Canada and visiting Niagara Falls.

Writing is hard for me when I am on vacation. Not the commercial writing I do, but the more soulful, personal things. I have lived alone for many years, and that’s how I write best, alone, in quiet, after having plenty of time to let feelings and thoughts meld into each other and make sense. But traveling with others, there’s always something going on, things to do and of course, people to talk to. Traveling with others, the wider world that we all interact with is far away, so the few of you traveling end up talking and sharing exclusively with each other, leaving little time to simply go into myself and let it all settle.

For someone like me, who needs that time to process my world, that makes writing nigh on to impossible.

I used to fret over this. Writing is a part of me. It is not just something I do, it is something that helps me make sense of my world. It is one of the rare places I can think out loud and when I am away from it too long, it is not a healthy thing for me. There was a time in my life that I was away from it for years, and it was not a good time for me. In fact, a big part of my coming back to myself was beginning to write again, and reclaiming writing as a way to become my best self again.

But I have come to grips with it. I have gotten over my fear that if I don’t write for a week or two that I’ll descend into bad places. And I have learned that if I take a week or two off now and again. my mind fills with thoughts and feelings and new experiences that fuel my writing for weeks.

And so it was that yesterday, as my son and I make the six-hour drive from Niagara to Vermont, I found myself thinking through the past week. What we had seen. The things that made me think. The things that made me feel. The lessons I learned and the lessons and feelings I was still working through.

It was a long list. But one thing rose to the top. Tuesday.

Tuesday, James and I had our “wet” day at the falls. We went down 230 feet to the edge of the falls, where they stood impossibly high and loud about us. We went through tunnels burrowed through the stone to portals underneath the falls where we could see the water falling from beneath the curtains of water. And then we took one of the boats that take you into the horseshoe center of the falls.

I know, such a hokie, touristy thing to do. James and I and a few hundred others sardined into a boat. Touristy maybe, but as it turned out, it was also awe-inspiring.

The definition of “awe” “is an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, wonder, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful,” And that is what you feel, standing at the front of this boat that seemed so big at the dock downstream, and suddenly seemed so impossibly tiny and fragile confronted with walls of water nearly two hundred feet high, the roar of over 3,000 tons of water each minute roaring. Suddenly, your whole perspective of your own importance, and the vastness of the miracle of creation and nature shifts. I could have stayed there at the front of that boat, surrounded by the Falls, feeling wonderfully small, for hours.

We have lost the meaning of awe in our world. It’s become a handy shorthand for something kinda cool. And in the process, the words Awe and Awesome have become diminished. Which is a shame. We need, I believe, that sense of “reverence, admiration, and wonder.” It keeps us. and the God who made us, in perspective. The loss of awe has been a long time coming. Industrialization, science, the shrinking of the world through media and technology have all whittled awe down to something bite-sized and easy to digest.

And in the process, something is lost. Something, I think, important.

There was a time we had more wonder in our lives, before science and technology when there was more reverence awe and wonder at things we could not grasp. Things we could not understand were common, and so, when something we could not grasp entered our lives, we were emotionally and spiritually prepared to deal with it.

Today however, we live in a place where everything is explained or explainable. And then, when something beyond us DOES happen, it is harder to accept. We wrestle and struggle for explanations. Because we are no longer able to make sense of things that don’t make sense.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying I am anti-science or technology. Far from it. I love knowing how my world works.

But I like reminders that even with all we know, there are things bigger than us. That we can be overcome by a true sense of awe by Niagara Falls. That there are things that remind us how small we are and how big God’s world is.

I can count the times I have been overcome with awe on my fingers. Some are places: The Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, Venice, Shakespeare’s home. the cliffs of Tintagel. Some are events: The birth of my children. The accepting of God into my heart. Being loved. Being with a parent as they breathe their last.

What these all have in common is that I am left speechless, so full of emotion and wonder that any words I might have are useless. I am left in wonder. I am changed.

In the day to day bustle, awe is often lost. We lose sight of the important because of the urgent in the moment demands. Awe changes that. We regain our place. We reclaim important. Somehow, our spirits become more what we are meant to be: Creatures of wonder.

Be well. Travel wisely.