ANNA WILDING
SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, FILM DIRECTOR, PHOTOGRAPHER, ARTIST, AND FORMER CANDIDATE FOR U.S. CONGRESS
Anna Wilding has spent her career moving between film sets as a director and producer, executive roles, and the campaign trail. As a Chief White House Correspondent she covered three administrations. She is the director, host, and writer of the documentary Buddha Wild: Monk in a Hut, a film blessed by the Dalai Lama that follows Thai and Sri Lankan Theravadin monks living far from home. The film has been cited as “enlightening,” “inspiring,” and “entertaining.” As a photographer she created the well-known Celebrate Hope: Obama Collection and exhibition. Her film and production work includes projects with Paramount, Warner Bros., and others.
She has also built businesses, completed a small tech exit in the 1990s, served in executive roles, advised multiple Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies, founded and led a charity for ten years, and led disaster-relief work after major earthquakes. She hosted the podcast Anna Wilding: Unstoppable, which reached the Top Ten on Amazon’s Goodreads within three episodes. Not one to rest on her laurels, during COVID she joined the Civil Air Patrol. She has spoken at Cannes, World Earth Week, the Norfolk Museum, SAG-AFTRA, and other forums.
Anna Wilding continues to work across business, film, photography, writing, and as a White House Correspondent. When she is not behind a camera or a keyboard of some sort, musical or otherwise, she can usually be found noticing the same things that appear in her essay: the height of a sunflower, the motion of the sky, and is up late at night questioning how we treat one another and working out how to make the planet better.
The Sky in Motion
ANNA WILDING
It is obvious to me that something larger than us exists. To treat ourselves as the only ones in the universe, the only conscious life and the only measure of meaning, strikes me as both arrogant and incomplete. There is always something bigger than us, seen or unseen. We are small specks of matter in the eyes of whatever holds the universe together. We can call it God or a presence. The name is less important than the recognition that we are held by something powerful we did not make. Gravity, God, Presence. We don’t look up at the stars in awe for no reason—the same sky in motion that has been there for every generation. We know in our hearts that we are responsible for our own actions. Yet the stars and the universe are still there, reminding us there is something bigger than us.
Nothing has proven God exists in a laboratory, and many stories we tell are fables. What remains striking is the independent appearance of similar teachings throughout history. The Ten Commandments, the core words of the Buddha, and more have common ground: do not steal; treat others as you would be treated. These ideas did not travel in one religion’s suitcase. They surfaced wherever people lived together— a pattern too steady to dismiss.
When societies lacked written constitutions, a shared religious framework often supplied the first common language of obligation. Not every religion has been good. The moral content at the center of several major traditions has remained steady while everything else changed.
I do not need God to have invented the physical universe in order to believe. The claim that God created the cosmos belongs to particular traditions. We don’t have to believe that God created the universe to believe in a greater presence. It may be teachings handed down, but it still implies something greater than us exists. We may have come from atoms, or apes, or fish—natural mechanisms. That does not cancel a sense of principles we know are right in our hearts. When we think of God, we think of generosity, love, the pull to treat others well, without needing God to have assembled the stars. The question of origin is logically independent.
The world speaks if we listen. The sun sets and rises. The butterfly flits and a bee stumbles. Waves form, come and go rhythmically. We are responsible for how we meet and ride them. A sunflower offers beauty, height, quiet strength. It’s a mathematical structure, its seeds arranged in spirals that make room for growth. The more closely we study the patterns in living things, the more natural patterns seem to line up with the mathematical and quantum descriptions we create to explain them. We do not need to know where or how we were made to recognize that God exists. God is in our hearts. We only have to be open and willing to notice that we are not the largest thing in the universe.