A Responsibility to Wonder: Pioneering Neuroscientist Charles Scott Sherrington on the Spirituality of Nature

“We have, because human, an inalienable prerogative of responsibility which we cannot devolve…not… even upon the stars. We can share it only with each other.”

To be fully awake to life is a matter of ceaselessly digging for that “submerged sunrise of wonder” — a matter of living, in the astronomer-poet Rebecca Elson’s immortal words, with “a responsibility to awe.” Out of that responsibility arises a kind of quietly rapturous spirituality — a way of moving through the world wonder-smitten by re...