Sophie Mariam is a Colorado-based policy advocate, yogi, and outdoor enthusiast who believes deeply in the healing power of movement, nature, and community. Support her Telluride Mountain Run adventure fundraiser and support her mission to get more women and girls into nature!
I am still a little awe-struck by Telluride Mountain Run.
It was a gritty day, full of wonder. The kind of day that leaves you exhausted, scraped up, humbled, and somehow more alive than when you started.
The ascents were stunning. The ridgelines were exposed and enormous. The San Juan Mountains seemed to stretch infinitely in every direction. The course itself was as tough as advertised: I got to climb to ridges above 12,700 feet, including Palmyra Peak, and the course included steep, rocky terrain, an off-trail traverse, and a descent through Bear Creek.
And somewhere up there, while running along a ridgeline at nearly 13,000 feet, I kept thinking about awe.
I’ve been reading Dacher Keltner’s Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. He defines awe as the experience of “being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” In this short sentence, he perfectly captures two central experiences of awe: vastness and a need for accommodation—the feeling that something is so much bigger, more complex, or more powerful than our existing mental framework that we have to adjust our understanding of the world to make room for it.
That definition kept coming back to me in Telluride, because awe isn’t always comfortable.
Something vast like the mountains that day can be beautiful, but it can also be destabilizing. It can make you feel small. It can remind you that you are not in control.
Vastness can be challenging and unsettling. But maybe that’s a good thing.
In this case, quite literally, I was standing on the ridgeline of Palmyra Peak. I had gotten out of my comfort zone and into the world: into nature, physical challenge, community, and an experience much bigger than the version of myself that had spent months training for a race.
Keltner’s research suggests that awe can quiet our self-focused thinking and make us feel more connected to something larger than ourselves. Studies of awe have found that it can diminish our sense of individual self and increase our sense of collective engagement.
One of the things I love about Keltner’s work is his distinction between the self and the smaller, “default mode” self.
Our everyday sense of “default” self isn’t inherently bad. In fact, it’s useful. It’s the part of us that knows who we are, what we want, what we’re capable of, and how to pursue our goals. Evolutionarily, it makes sense that we’re oriented toward agency, independence, and competitive advantage.
That self was actually pretty useful during race training.
But when it takes over completely, it can become exhausting. We can become consumed with ourselves: How am I doing? Am I good enough? Am I behind? What do other people think? Why didn’t I do that better? What do I need to fix?
I know that voice all too well.
Keltner’s research offers a fascinating counterpoint. When we experience awe, the brain appears to engage less in self-referential processing, while our attention becomes more absorbed by the experience in front of us.
In other words: sometimes the antidote to being stuck inside yourself is to encounter something much bigger than yourself.
And Telluride was very, very big. Palmyra Peak rises to about 13,320 feet, surrounded by the immense landscape of the San Juan Mountains. The view took me out of myself.
But there was another layer to that feeling that I couldn’t ignore.
This was not simply my mountain adventure. I kept coming back to the fact that this is Ute land.
The Town of Telluride describes the valley as having deep roots in the history of the Ute people, who were the area’s original inhabitants and used the valley as a summer camp for centuries.
As I stood there looking at the same mountains that have existed for millennia, I thought about how Keltner explains awe as a force that also awakens us to the forces that shape our lives long before we ever make an individual choice: family, culture, history, class, geography, the circumstances into which we are born.
We are individuals, yes. But we are also products of relationships, ecosystems, histories, and communities much larger than ourselves.
And I felt grateful—and humbled—to be on that land that day.
I felt grateful for the privilege of being able to train for a mountain race, travel to Telluride, pay for a place to stay, take time away from work, own the gear required to participate, and experience this landscape for fun.
Awe makes it harder to believe the myth that we are entirely self-made.
We are not. We are held and shaped by so many things.
And that brings me to another one of Keltner’s “eight wonders of life”: collective effervescence.
It’s his term for the electricity we feel when people move, celebrate, sing, dance, work, or struggle together. His research identifies collective movement alongside nature, moral beauty, music, spirituality, visual art, big ideas, and life and death as major sources of human awe.
I felt collective effervescence in Telluride, too.
Because community is formed at the price of convenience.
It wasn’t convenient for this pack of mountain lovers to haul ourselves to a remote box canyon in southwest Colorado.
It wasn’t convenient to arrange accommodations, travel, training, gear, race logistics, safety systems, aid stations, volunteers, or all of the other infrastructure required to put on a technical mountain race.
But we did it. We showed up. And then we ran through the mountains together.
We sometimes talk about community as though it is something that should simply be there for us. But real community requires effort. It asks us to leave our homes, put down our phones, show up for one another, sweat together, struggle together, celebrate together.
There is something powerful about choosing inconvenience in order to experience human connection.
Which brings me to another of Keltner’s “8 wonders of life”……one I experienced as I finished the race.
At one point, I was flying down the mountain. Pure euphoria.
I was listening to a ridiculous Rihanna EDM remix, running downhill through Bear Creek, feeling strong and alive and completely convinced that I had this thing figured out.
And then……I absolutely ate it. Hard.
There is something humbling about going from I AM ONE WITH THE MOUNTAIN to face-first in the dirt in about three seconds.
I got back up. I was bloody, but I was okay. And eventually I crossed the finish line smiling.
Maybe that is another kind of awe: realizing that our bodies are both incredibly fragile and incredibly resilient.
But the part of the day that has stayed with me most wasn’t actually the summit.
It was Fireman Bob.
After I fell, a stranger named Bob helped stitch me up. There is something profound about being cared for by someone you have never met.
Keltner calls this moral beauty- the awe we experience when we witness other people’s courage, kindness, generosity, or goodness. His research suggests that these encounters can produce some of the same self-transcendent effects as awe in nature.
He writes that witnessing moral beauty can quiet the self-focused mind and remind us of our connection to other people.
That feels important right now. Because we don’t need to summit a 13er every day to experience awe.
Sometimes we just need to notice the stranger who helps you when you fall, the friend who drives three hours to hike with you, the person who volunteers at an aid station.
Notice the people who dedicate their lives to building communities where other people can flourish. Notice the ordinary acts of courage and kindness happening around us all the time.
And importantly, notice all the women who make space for other women.
Keltner’s writing also refers to awe as evoking what also happens to be one of my favorite Walt Whitman Blades of Grass lines:
“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
Whitman’s poem has always reminded me of something we often say at the end of yoga class:
The light in me honors the light in you. Or in other words, “Namaste.”
There is a reason these ideas keep appearing across different traditions.
The Sanskrit namaste is rooted in namas, meaning to bow or honor, and te, meaning “to you.” And yogic traditions contain their own expressions of this dissolution of the individual self into something larger: So Hum—”I am That”—and Aham Brahmasmi, often translated as “I am the Divine” or “I am universal consciousness.”
Different traditions, different languages, different histories—but a similar intuition:
I am not separate from the world around me.
My life is intertwined with yours. My flourishing depends on yours. Every atom belonging to me belongs to you.
We need more awe.
This brings me back to where this whole series began. I wrote these posts because I believe getting outside can be a practice of remembering that we are living beings—not machines. That nature isn’t simply a backdrop for our lives or a resource for us to consume. That we belong to something larger.
This is part of what ecofeminism has come to mean to me.
As I wrote in my last post, ecofeminism asks us to challenge systems that treat both nature and women’s bodies as things to be extracted from, controlled, commodified, or endlessly optimized. It asks us to imagine a different relationship—one based on care, dignity, interdependence, and flourishing.
And I think awe belongs in that vision, because it interrupts the story that we are separate and everything exists for our individual consumption. It reminds us that we are part of ecosystems—ecological, social, and cultural—and that we need and rely on one another.
The Cairn Project is working to give more women and girls access to the transformative power of outdoor experiences.
That’s why this fundraiser has mattered so much to me.
Because people need places where they can experience themselves as part of something bigger. We need moments that pull us out of our own heads, spaces where girls can discover that their bodies are powerful, not because they are beautiful or marketable or useful to someone else, but because they allow them to experience the world.
We all need awe, and we need to make sure access to that awe isn’t reserved for the people who already have the money, time, gear, confidence, transportation, and social networks to find it. The gift of the outdoors should be bigger than that.
So, to everyone who donated, shared my fundraiser, sent me encouragement, asked about training, listened to me talk about trail shoes approximately 900 times, or simply cheered me on:
Thank you. You helped me do something hard. More importantly, you helped me support an organization working to make these experiences possible for more women and girls.
I crossed the finish line bloody, exhausted, and smiling. But the finish line wasn’t really the point.
The point was the feeling of being very, very small beneath something very, very vast. That reminder that my life is not separate from the people and places around me. And the deep, wonderful realization that there is so much more to experience when we step outside ourselves.
Maybe that’s what awe gives us. Not an escape from the world, but a deeper way of belonging to it.
And if this fundraiser has taught me anything, it’s that we need more opportunities for women and girls to feel that belonging.
So let’s keep getting outside. Let’s keep building community. Let’s keep caring for one another.
And let’s keep giving each other the gift of awe.
If you haven’t donated yet, please consider making a contribution to The Cairn Project through my fundraiser. Any amount helps support more women and girls in accessing outdoor adventure, community, and connection.
Thank you for being part of this little adventure with me.
See you on the trail.
