During a Zoom meeting in the first month of the Covid pandemic, a colleague in New York City gasped in the middle of a conversation. He had been arguing for a certain approach to fundraising, but suddenly he said, “Oh, wow, wait a second.” We all waited as he stood up from his desk and disappeared from view. Soon he was back. “Oh, my god, I can’t believe what just happened. A flock of seagulls flew right down the middle of West 49^th Street! And then, at the corner, they all turned right and headed down Eighth Avenue. The firefighters came out from their station to watch!”

In his essay “The Bird and the Machine,” anthropologist and essayist Loren Eiseley mused that the most beautiful sight in the world might be “birds taking over New York as the last man has run away to the hills.” Humans were not running to the hills on that spring day, but they had vacated the streets to such an extent that the birds did seem to be taking over spaces formerly occupied by the pre-pandemic chaos of honking taxis, the crosstown bus (heading down the one-way street in the opposite direction from the gulls), and a steady stream of pedestrians in a hurry.

It’s so important to accept invitations to transcend when something wondrous offers itself to us! That man and those firefighters could have stifled their responses of delight, telling themselves that awe and amazement were too childish for such professionals as they. Instead, they succumbed to wonder. They let the Earth uplift them. They transcended downward.

It might be a dose of beauty that invites you to transcend, or it might be something else, something you overhear, something odd you have to stop and look at, or some meeting of your own thought of the moment and an event nearby that seems to have been preordained to arrive just for your enlightenment.

The subject of transcending downward is not the thing that calls, it is your own willingness to be swept away.

Note: After our July 27 edition, Radical Joy Revealed will be taking a summer break in August and will be back September 7.