Awe and Wonder

Discover how a sense of wonder can bring more meaning, joy and connection into your life

This month’s Culture Therapy Prescription will help you feel good this season. Discover the podcasts, books, websites, apps, events, and places that can connect you with more of what you need for better emotional and mental well-being.

This independent Bookshop Week, escape into the Imaginary with some of our favourite independent bookshops.

A visit to a museum can be one of those everyday adventures that helps inspire us in our daily lives, feeds our curiosity, and brings a sense of awe and wonder into our days. Here’s a round-up of five museums in London that recently offered the life pick-me-up that we needed.

The sea contains multitudes and it is exactly this complexity that keeps calling designer Sarah Robertson to it in moments of loss and need.

We speak to Amber Rich, founder of The Little Retreat and The Big Retreat Festival about how she arrived at these projects, how wellness is now something that we all reach for, and her role as a curator of discovery and awe.

Looking for some inspiration for where to shop for those indie magazines you love? Here are just a handful of our favorites. Let us know yours.

Now allowing in humans, this store has everything the monster in you needs (and a not-so-secret cause behind it all).

For curiosity seekers, book lovers, and those looking for an escape into ideas, Crickhowell’s Book-ish makes a community out of reading.

In a moment when time is stretching out, Anthony Gormley’s “Iron Men” captures the wonder of shifting lives.

Make your own riverside tent and join the world’s largest philosophy and music festival this weekend.

Illustrator Michaela Hobson revisits an old favorite, London’s Natural History Museum, and finds a place for inspiration, knowledge and respite.

Dartington, we found out, is one of those special places that are many different things to many different people, some of which we’d guessed at, and many of which we hadn’t. It’s like a polymath of a place.

Jodrell Bank is one of those truly special places for a spectacular, constant, reason. Right here is one of the biggest and most powerful radio telescopes in the world.

At a time when we’re driven more and more into the informational world of our phones, Bath’s Magalleria stakes physical/ actual space for the recent resurgence of independent magazines.

A space dedicated to bringing fiction into the world, that supports our real lives as it does so.

A community classroom space in Rochester teaching what really matters in life.

A movement born on social media changing the narratives that make up our neighborhoods.

Between the setting and the breathtaking view, it’s difficult to leave here without a newfound sense of awe and wonder - a feeling we could all use, at the moment.

Our take on whether Disneyland is really “The Happiest Place on Earth”.

A smart speakeasy to get your curiosity peaked while having a laugh.

As humans we’re obsessed by time, with running through our days while also being in the moment. We’re a little confused about it. To get a more balanced, holistic view head to San Francisco’s The Interval.

Maria Popova, a similar collector of interesting (in ideas rather than things) encourages: “Be curious. Be constantly, consistently, indiscriminately curious.” We had that quote in mind talking to Lea and wandering through Lucky Penny Parlor.

Moab is a place to discover yourself in the present, but with a deep sense of being cradled by the past. A place to feel beloved on the earth.

The great irony of Marfa is that it isn’t really trying to be anything other than what it is: a tiny, dusty Texas town. The city of Marfa website pitches it as “more than just a place. . . . It’s a state of mind,” but my mom and I agreed that that gives the wrong idea.

City Lights Bookstore is a literary landmark and a magical meeting place for intellectual inquiry.

Most city gardens are well manicured and pretty to visit, but Descanso maintains a unique kind of messiness that instantly transports you into a magical world of plants, trees, and flowers.

Waking up in Joshua Tree was waking up in another world. Had I even seen the sun rise before? Had the light ever touched anything with such intention?? It hit me fairly quickly what people find appealing about this place. In the light of day, the landscape feels less like a barren wasteland and more like a waiting canvas, a palpable feeling of possibility filling the limitless space.

It’s when Susan Orlean writes of the multipurpose function of libraries now to be the spaces that can reflect our public imagination that we feel like signing up to be a librarian right now.

We talked to Silent Book Club co-founder Laura Gluhanich about how a simple night of reading with a friend became a global phenomenon.

For the introverts, a book club that doesn’t get you talking.

There are the obvious jokes one can make about the plethora of experiential pop-up museums that have emerged in our new Instagram-able world, but perhaps there is a kind of beauty that would not have been dreamed nor experienced had social media not been invented.