Masks are REQUIRED for all.

Beverly psychologist  Dr. Mary Baures will discuss her new book Awakening Awe: An Illustrated Journey to Reverence. After spending much of her life treating psychological trauma, Dr. Baures took up wildlife photography. In the jungles of Africa, Brazil, and Borneo, relationships with animals changed her in profound ways. Her journeys into the wild brought her back to what she didn’t know she’d lost—the magic of childhood. She realized that tiny magical moments, like mini-rainbows cascading in a waterfall, the clean leap of a leopard from a tree, the graceful dance of impalas,  went unnoticed while she sat in boxy rooms with ideas, disconnected from the energy flowing through living things. Her generation had been part of the largest human migration in history. We moved away from sunshine and fresh air into buildings where we viewed the world on screens. She realized she had become unmoored from her roots in nature. Wild animals spoke to the forgotten parts of her.   

Wildlife guided her across the threshold of human limitation to the force that blossoms flowers—from which we came and to which we return. Her narrative – woven around encounters with leopards, snow monkeys, grizzlies and orphan orangutans is an urgent warning for us to end our cult of superiority. She documents how the coronavirus pandemic grew out of our assumption that we own the earth. A vibrant web of bees, ants, bats, frogs, and birds support us, but our delusion that we are separate keeps us from even trying to coexist. We place ourselves above nature, at the apex of a hierarchical order, with little value on the species upon which we depend, but in the circle of life, no one is ahead or above. We are all equal and interdependent.

Life is a flow of relationship exchanges.  The grass becomes the antelope, then the leopard. The earth is not just under our feet. It is around and inside us as water forms into flesh, oxygen enables us to breathe, and calcium and protein fuel our actions. When we dump toxic chemicals into the earth, into water, air, and the source of life, they become us.

Dr. Baures will also discuss her last book, Love Heals Baby Elephants; Rebirthing Ivory Orphan.   As a trauma expert, she was drawn to the plight of calves who watched their families massacred for ivory trinkets. She adopted four baby elephants at a Nairobi orphanage and showed how the love of other orphans and the caretakers enabled them to trust again.

Questions? Contact Lisa Ryan at ryan@noblenet.org.

This program was made possible with funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Science as administered by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners.