These are the Days of Awe. The days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when God supposedly writes our names in the books of life, writes whether we will live or die in the coming year, whether our lives will be good or bad.

I am not a very observant Jew -- I have no plans to go to High Holy Day services (which, true to my Jewish roots, I feel a bit guilty about)--but I try to be an observant person. And on these Days of Awe, I find myself in utter shock and awe. Every day, more horrible news finds its way into our eyes and ears - tsunamis and hurricanes and earthquakes and war claiming and displacing tens of thousands of lives. Rumblings of a coming flu pandemic. Reminders that the world beneath our feet, the waters that give us comfort, the bodies that move us through this life, are much more precarious, much more transitory, much more prone to turn on us, than we'd like to admit. In these Days of Awe, I think it's important to acknowledge this, the awe of this, head on, to remember how small we are in the large scheme of things, how fleeting our time is on this fierce and amazing planet.

Not that it is easy to keep this larger perspective going. A few years ago, my husband and I left the kids with my mother in law and took off for a long weekend of camping in the Grand Canyon. It was a couple of days after Rosh Hashanah, smack in the middle of the Days of Awe. One morning, we got up early enough to catch the sun rise. At least two dozen people stood in complete silence, watching pink and orange light sweep up the walls of the canyon. It was a holy moment. I felt connected to something greater than myself in a way that I never could inside a temple. Then someone let out the loudest fart I've ever heard in my life. It seemed to echo, to multiply, through the canyon. Everyone started laughing. The reverent mood was broken. We were back in the human world.

The human world and the natural world have been colliding so much lately, but without such funny results. As I write this, people in Pakistan are trying to dig their loved ones out of rubble; people in Nicaragua are trying to dig their loved ones out of mud; people from New Orleans are trying to reclaim their flooded lives. All those hands, reaching through despair, reaching towards a shattered future. Sometimes reaching towards hope. And in these Days of Awe, in all our days, I think it is our obligation to reach back, to do what we can, in our short time here, to make the world -- the human world, the natural world -- a better place. None of us can know whether we'll be written into the book of life for the coming year, but we can write our own books while we're here, both literally and figuratively. We can write out our heartache. We can write out our love. We can try to write a better future for our planet.

In his book, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as Journey of Transformation, Rabbi Alan Lew writes about how the Days of Awe are an opportunity for us to experience brokenheartedness in a deep way, in a way that opens us up to compassion, to action, to faith. He writes, of the human condition, of our mortality, our capacity for loss: This is real. This is very real. This is absolutely inescapable. And we are utterly unprepared. And we have nothing to offer but each other and our broken hearts. And that will be enough.

In this time of great planetary heartbreak, let's remember what we have to offer each other. Let's remember to let our own shock and awe at the state of the world counter the shock and awe of bombs and other disasters. Let's use this short time we have on the planet to create some awe-inspiring change.

Gayle Brandeis is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write and The Book of Dead Birds: A Novel, which won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change.