A note on this series: This is a five-article exploration of birds, attention, awe, and the RV lifestyle.
Notice → Understand → Experience → Awe → Meaning
Each article stands on its own but together they form a progression—from learning to pay attention to discovering why awe matters and how the RV lifestyle gives us opportunities to experience it.
I write this because I feel compelled to do so.
The same way I felt compelled to write Learning to Speak Bird.
Some ideas interest us. Others stay with us until we have no choice but to follow them.
Awe has become one of those ideas for me.
Why awe matters now
We may need it more than we realize
We live in a world that constantly demands our attention. Screens, notifications, headlines, schedules, and endless streams of information compete for our eyes and minds.
We have access to more information than any generation before us, yet it is remarkably easy to become disconnected from the world immediately around us.
Awe asks something different.
Stop. Look. Listen.
For a moment, notice something larger than yourself.
A bird crossing the sky. Mountains rising beyond the road. The sudden silence of a forest. A landscape changing outside the windshield.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve become so interested in awe.
It draws us out of ourselves and back into the world.
Where awe begins
When something becomes larger than our ordinary understanding
I’ve spent a lot of time wondering where the feeling of awe actually comes from.
Is it in the bird? The mountain? The desert? The night sky?
Perhaps not.
Those things can awaken awe but the feeling itself happens within us.
Awe seems to appear when we encounter something larger, more beautiful, mysterious, or extraordinary than our everyday understanding can contain.
Maybe that’s why attention matters so much.
We can stand beneath the same sky every night and barely notice it. Then one evening we look up and something changes.
The sky hasn’t changed. We have.
Suddenly, we feel small—not insignificant but connected to something much larger than ourselves.
Perhaps that’s where awe begins.
The world hasn’t changed
Our attention has
The world around us hasn’t suddenly become more remarkable.
The birds were always singing. The mountains were always there. Sunsets have always painted the sky.
What has changed is how often we stop to notice them.
We rush past landscapes, walk while looking at our phones, and move from one task to the next without taking time to simply observe.
Perhaps awe doesn’t require us to find something extraordinary.
Perhaps it asks us to see the ordinary differently.
That’s something birds have taught me and RVing has reinforced: when we slow down, pay attention, and give ourselves time to look, the world begins revealing what we were too busy to see.
The bird in you
Learning to step outside yourself
There is something humbling about watching a bird go about its life without any awareness of us.
An Ibis waits at the edge of a pond. A Roadrunner moves through the desert, perfectly adapted to a place we might find harsh. A Snow Goose begins a journey of thousands of miles.
They aren’t performing for us.
They are simply living.
And when we watch closely, our attention shifts away from ourselves and toward another living creature and the world it inhabits.
Perhaps that’s part of what awe does.
For a moment, we become less important to ourselves.
We’re still there. But we’re no longer the center of the story.
Awe makes the world bigger
There is more to life than our immediate concerns
One of the remarkable things about awe is how it changes our sense of scale.
Standing beneath a vast night sky or looking across an immense desert landscape, our everyday worries can suddenly seem smaller.
They haven’t disappeared.
They’ve been put into perspective.
We spend much of our lives focused on what is immediately in front of us—our schedules, problems, and responsibilities. Awe reminds us that we are part of something much larger.
The world doesn’t become smaller. Our worries do.
Perhaps that’s one reason awe can leave us feeling refreshed rather than diminished.
What RVing has taught me
Thirty years of learning to notice
After 30 years of snowbirding, I’ve come to realize that RVing has changed more than where I spend my winters.
It has changed how I travel.
I’ve learned not to measure a journey only by how far we’ve gone or how quickly we’ve arrived. Some of the moments I remember most are those when we slowed down enough to notice what was around us.
A sunset over the desert. A mountain glowing in the evening light. A quiet campground morning. A small town we hadn’t planned to visit.
None required an extraordinary destination.
They required attention.
Perhaps that’s what all these years of RVing have taught me: when we give ourselves permission to slow down, the world keeps offering us reasons to stop and look.
Learning to pay attention
It can become a way of living
When I began Learning to Speak Bird, I thought I was learning how to identify birds.
What I was really learning was how to pay attention.
Over time, that habit spilled beyond birding. I began noticing the landscape, changes in light and weather, the sounds of a place, and details that might once have passed unnoticed.
The Cactus Wren may have taught me to look more closely at the desert but the lesson didn’t end with the bird.
Paying attention became a way of experiencing the world.
Perhaps that’s what I value most about learning to speak bird.
It changed what I notice.
Why we need awe
Making room for something larger than ourselves
Perhaps we need awe today more than ever.
We live surrounded by noise, information, and constant demands for our attention. It’s easy to become absorbed in the immediate and forget there is a much larger world beyond ourselves.
Awe interrupts that pattern.
It asks us to stop and notice something that doesn’t revolve around us—a bird moving through the desert, a mountain beyond the road, a sky filled with stars, or the quiet beauty of an ordinary morning.
I’ve come to believe this matters.
Awe reminds us that we are part of something larger.
It doesn’t solve our problems or make the world less complicated.
It gives us another perspective from which to see them.
A life with room for awe
Perhaps this is what I’ve been learning all along
When I look back at the years I’ve spent RVing, birding, photographing, and simply paying attention, I see a common thread.
I was learning to make room.
Room to stop. Room to wander. Room to look more closely. Room to be surprised.
RVing gave me the freedom to slow down. Birds taught me to pay attention. Awe taught me that the world is more remarkable when I stop making myself the center of it.
I don’t think any of this was something I set out to learn.
It simply happened by paying attention.
And perhaps that’s what I mean by the bird in you.
There is a part of us that still wants to look up, follow a bird across the sky, wonder where a road leads, or stand quietly before something too large to explain.
Maybe we don’t need to find that part of ourselves.
Maybe we simply need to give it room.
Making room for awe
Seeing the extraordinary in the life we already have
I began by saying I felt compelled to write this, much as I felt compelled to write Learning to Speak Bird.
I think I now understand why.
Birds taught me to notice. RVing gave me room to notice. Awe showed me why it matters.
Perhaps that’s all I’ve been trying to say.
Look closely. Slow down. Make room for awe.
The Series Begins Again
← Explore from the beginning: The Power of Awe: An Ancient Human Experience
Return to where the exploration began.
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Editor’s note
This article was originally published in September 2026. Information reflects what was accurate at the time of writing. Conditions, access, and amenities may change over time, so please verify current details before planning your trip.
To maintain transparency and editorial independence, this website contains no ads, no sponsored content, and no affiliate links—just firsthand RV travel experiences and practical information for fellow travelers.
