the difference between wonder and awe

& why wonder feels like home

I’ve been thinking about the difference between wonder and awe. They’re cousins, I think. Raised in the same household, taught to speak the same language, but they use different inflections. Wonder whispers. Awe shouts.

Wonder is the soft inhale. The widened eyes. It’s the tilt of the head, the “what if,” the quiet smile. Wonder feels like being held. It asks questions, but gently. It reaches toward something, curious, generous, willing. It says, I want to know you, i want you to know me. Wonder wants to touch mystery and stay intact. No rattled foundations necessary.

When we wonder at something, it’s because something in it feels of us. Familiar and strange at once, like seeing your own reflection in someone else’s face. Wonder invites closeness. It draws us near. It’s an invitation to relationship. To understanding. Wonder is relational — I am here, and so is this. It’s the hand outstretched.

Awe is different.

Awe doesn’t ask. Awe arrives like a thunderclap. Awe knocks you off your axis and doesn’t wait for you to recover. It’s not the hand outstretched — it’s the sky torn open. It rearranges the room. Awe is what you feel standing at the edge of grief, or the base of a mountain, or in the eye of a storm — that dizzying, holy sense that the world is both impossibly vast and terrifyingly precise, and that you are entirely real, and entirely irrelevant, all at once.

Awe is separating. It often comes with fear. Think of God. Think of religion. We speak of awe as a trembling thing. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Awe humbles. It does not hold your hand — it asks you to bow. To shrink. To submit.

And it’s not always bad. Sometimes we need to be cracked open. Sometimes we need to remember we are not the center. But awe demands reverence. It keeps us at a distance. It says, This is not yours. This is bigger than you.

And maybe I’ve spent years chasing awe. Big moments. Big feelings. Big truths. Thinking that awe was the only portal to transcendence. But lately, I find myself craving the smallness of wonder. The quiet delight. The blink-and-you-miss-it miracle of a dandelion seed taking flight. Of someone you love remembering your favorite mug. Of watching a child discover their own shadow and gasp before beginning to dance with it.

Wonder doesn’t demand that you transform.
It simply asks that you notice. It calls you to the moment, present, whole and willing.

Awe is the fire that cracks you open.
Wonder is the light that gently pours in.

Lately, I’m finding that being cracked open is less interesting to me than being gently illuminated.

I’m less interested in being undone.
I’m more interested finding myself summoned and returned.
To myself.
To each other.
To this world.