Tag: Wonder

Beauty, poetry, Uncategorized

In Praise of the Ordinary

annacitrino

“Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.” –Abraham Joshua Heschel

Spring has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere, the calendar says. It’s raining outside today but two days ago the world was full of sun and wildflowers. Walking in a field of wildflowers isn’t like walking in the Queen’s Garden at Regents Park, a world redolent with roses, stuffed with enormous, full blossoms filled with color, rich with light.

Wildflowers, on the other hand, are generally small, their forms simple. One might even call their appearance ordinary. But these ordinary flower folk spread across a hillside delight the heart. People long for their appearance, often travel miles to see them, and walk across hillsides for hours in hopes for a glimpse at their ordinary faces. Milkmaids, Douglas iris, buttercups, sun cups, shooting stars, though their forms are ordinary, come spring we long to greet them.

We long for the newness and color spring brings. We want to breathe it in, surround ourselves with swaths of landscape tinted with blossoms–the pale pink blush cherry trees wear, plum blossom’s gowns of white lace, and azalea’s soft pastels. We want to swim in rivers of bluebells, dance through fields of poppies’ brilliant red skirts swirled around their narrow stems. “Colours are the wounds of light,” said Blake. Indeed, as if smitten with Cupid’s dart, springs’ flowers can make us swoon. Though these spring blossoms are small, they can be myriad, their bodies singing in a great chorus their love of being alive, their wish to give more life. Wildflowers come to us of their own accord, not because of something we do. They are an unspoken embodiment of grace, a reminder of all the earth bestows on us, a love letter soaked through with color, wound with light, written in the language of pollen and petals.

There’s nothing a person can do to impress a wildflower, yet in the wonder of their ordinary forms their beauty repeatedly impresses us. In his poem, “The River of Ordinary Moments,” Max Reif writes,

I am stunned by the beauty of the ordinary,
so that sometimes the ordinary seems mis-named, and yet
it is ordinary because it is quiet with no fanfare
…
No one is famous to the ordinary,
you can’t impress it.

If one stops to think about it, the most ordinary of moments in life are also simultaneously filled with the extraordinary. Wildflowers, for all their appearing simplicity in their forms, nevertheless support entire ecosystems. They don’t need pampering. They just want to grow. As Ire’ne Laura Silva writes in her post “Where Wildflowers Bloom,” on the Texas Highways site, “Wildflowers are not just pretty spots of roadside color or willful weeds; wildflowers are a reminder that where life ends, it will return. That beauty endures. That the stubborn and glorious earth harbors and nourishes and compels life to bloom again and again.” Life is in continuous rebirth. What an extraordinary thing to consider as we think about our own life’s revolutions.

When you look more closely at what wildflowers do, it turns out that wildflowers aren’t exactly ordinary. Flowers have an electrical charge to attract pollinators. Our life sustenance depends on those who depend on the pollinators. One of every three mouthfuls of food depend on pollinators. Insects need flowers, and we need flowers too.

Most of us live what we likely consider ordinary lives. We rise each day and do our work. We make plans with family members or friends, experience loss and pain. We learn what we love and celebrate with neighbors. We grow, we change. Humans share the collective knowledge across millennia. If we consider the trajectory of history and the struggles everyday people have faced over time, human experience isn’t particularly ordinary. Leymah Gbowee, who had a significant part to play in ending Liberia’s ongoing civil war, says: “Everyone has a role to play in changing the tide in our world. It has nothing to do with your academic background or your social status. It has to do with your tenacity, your strength and your willpower to want to make change.” Even our own personal struggles to adjust to ongoing change, adapt to new roles and successes, or to cope with our particular illnesses, ongoing pain, or griefs–all of these things require courage, even bravery in the most ordinary of days.

Our lives are made up mostly of these ordinary days. Each of them are full of wonder. It’s wondrous to have rolled topsy turvy across the grass as a child, to have tasted the spark of snowy cold on my tongue, to have jumped through my own arms, felt ocean waves pull against my calves, smelled the sweat from a horse I rode after racing across a meadow, and to have sung with my mother at the piano. It’s wondrous to sense the warmth of my partner’s hand in mine, and to feel my cat’s calm presence beside me. Wonder abounds.

Emily Dickinson wrote “I am Nobody! Who are you?” It’s perhaps out of fashion to be Nobody. These days voices clamber everywhere to be heard. Everybody seems to want to be Somebody. As does all of nature, wildflowers simply want to just go on being what they are. What they are in all their ordinary wonder is needed. They are part of a greater interbeing. Reif goes on to say in his poem,

I do not want to be
taken from the flow of the ordinary
to any pinnacle or promontory from which
I will only have to climb, or fall, down again,
I do not want to be special in that way,
I want the tick of thoughts in my mind to run out
and the storehouse of thoughts to be emptied
and not replaced by any others,
I want to disappear, disappear
and become that current
that all distinct drops are lost in, and then
the ocean into which all rivers go to die.

Flowers bring us together and share their beauty. They fill us with hope. Whether you are able to see wildflowers in person or view photos of them, or simply stand in an open space remembering them and wishing for their presence, may you sense their lives fill you with joy and carry you into a place of gratitude and wonder, and give praise the ordinary.

I leave you with this short film Gratitude with Louis Schwartzberg’s time-lapse photography and words from Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast. I’ve watched it many times and the beauty it reveals still fills me with gratitude for the wonder of being alive.

Uncategorized

Drawing From Great Roots

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We did not come to remain whole. We came to lose our leaves like the trees, Trees that start again, Drawing up from the great roots.–Robert Bly

A short time ago, I visited the Angel Oak in South Carolina. A live oak tree that shades 17,000 square feet, is 65 feet tall, and has a circumference of 31.5 feet. It received its name from those who owned the property in the 1700s, Martha and Justus Angel and is thought to be the largest tree east of the Mississippi. So many trees were cut down as settlers made their way across what has now become the United States. It’s estimated that less than 10% of the forests remain that once covered North America (see more here.) To stand in the outstretched presence of such an old and enormous tree felt like a blessing. While this aged oak is thought to be 400 years old, the age of the Cypress of Abarqu in Iran is estimated to be between 4,000-5,000 years old, and is thought to be the oldest tree in Asia. Imagining the weather, wars, and other disruptions the cypress has been through in that stretch of time and the many changes the tree endured, it’s astonishing that it survived. Yet there are other ancient trees throughout the world as well. The baobabs in the African continent can live as much as 2,000 years. A Patagonian cypress known as Lañilawal or Alerce Milenario is estimated to have sprouted 5,000 years ago, and the Tjikko spruce in Norway is thought to be an astonishing 9,550 years old. 

Reflecting on time and trees, the concept of the family tree comes to mind. While researching for the book I’m currently writing connected to ancestors who lived in Nebraska, Wyoming, Iowa, and South Dakota, I’ve noticed that I don’t have to go more than a few generations back in time and my ancestor’s lives fall into deep shadows of the unknown. I have photos that were given to me of ancestors I don’t know the names of. Because their stories weren’t told, I’m left to imagine them. I’m like the character Pip in the opening lines of Charles Dicken’s Great Expectations, who never saw his father or mother, and conjures up what they are like based on the shape of the letters on their tomb stones. That’s a bleak world to be born into. The writer Barry Lopez states, “Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.” I can’t help but think that part of the collective grief of our era is at least in part that we have lost the stories that connect us to the land and the people we come from and are connected to. 

In various parts of the world people set up altars to their ancestors. I recall seeing these in Asia, often containing photos of family members who have passed on. Ancestral altars are a way of remembering how our individual lives are part of a much larger interconnections reaching back in time to places and ways of being and knowing beyond wherever it is one currently situated. Mariella Segarra, in her NPR article, “How to deepen your connection with your ancestors,” describes the altar she has set up in her home. “Altars are for everybody,” she states, and goes on to explain how to create one using objects your ancestors may have carried, used, or that assist you in imagining them—a pen, piece of jewelry, handkerchief, dried leaf or flower, a pebble, or scrap of wallpaper. The point of doing this is to help people recognize we’re woven into a social, historical, environmental fabric and the objects help us remember this. Our lives are not single threads blowing about in the wind. Scientists are discovering the bacteria in our gut can affect our emotional wellbeing, and trauma people experience can be passed on to those around us and possibly to those who come after us as well. How we respond to ourselves, to each other, and the earth we walk on matters. The struggles we may be experiencing are connected to a wider, longer story. We are, so to speak, part of a larger tree. The cambium layer of our present life is connected to branches and deep roots.

Within one’s own town there are many intersecting worlds and histories, so much we don’t know about the stories of the land around us, as well as each other’s stories and the stories of our ancestors. How do we begin to hear the stories of the land we walk on, the stories of ancestors that were never told. George David Haskell spends a great deal of time listening to trees. “To attend to a tree’s song is therefore to touch a stethoscope to the skin of a landscape, hearing what stirs below,” he writes in his article published in the Scientific American article “Ten Ways to Listen to Trees.” Haskell describes listening with one’s hands, feet, as well as nose. “Gusts of wind sonify plant diversity,” Haskell explains. “Oak’s voice is coarse-grained, throaty; maple’s is sandy and light. These differences have their origins in plant evolution and adaption. Drought-resistant oak leaves are thicker, tougher than the water-hungry maple. The different sounds of trees on a dry mountain ridge and in a moist forested hollow speak to the particularities of the ecology of each place.” These are fine distinctions, ones that come with close attention nurtured over time. I can’t help but wonder how I might better understand my own relationship to the world around me if I reached more often to touch the branches and roots of my life, attended more fully to the different textures beyond the boundaries of my current comprehension, listened more carefully inside the silences of history.

We often don’t know the stories of trees and see them as strangers on the street, explains Haskell in an interview with Sam Mowe titled “Listening to Trees.” “It often takes an act of will to learn these stories because, in general, cities present trees as passive, municipal objects that are completely stripped of their stories. We need to swim upstream against that tide to find their stories and, therefore, start to belong to each other.” The article ends by suggesting the following as a way to begin to transcend our emotions’ and minds’ limitations and to grow in awareness of our connection to life’s web: 

Pick a tree.
Commit to return to it again and again.
Bring an enthusiastic openness of your senses to the tree.
Don’t think it will lead to enlightenment, insight, or sacrament.
Try and visit the tree in various weather conditions.
Notice how different people interact with the tree.
Notice your own thoughts and experiences.

A similar practice could be followed in connection with ancestors on a family tree. Pick an ancestor. Select an object, photo, or word to represent the ancestor. Make a place for the object, photo, or other chosen reminder and place it in a location where you can greet your ancestor every day. If you want, light a candle or bring an offering. Without any particular expectation, spend a few moments just being present in remembrance of that life. Notice your thoughts and emotions.

Before getting on my bicycle yesterday afternoon, I received a text saying my pregnant niece was going into labor. A new child was about to enter the world. Climate change, combat between Israel and Hamas, missile strikes on Ukraine, ongoing hate crimes, rising inflation—this is the world new children are born into. While these many alarming things are going on, Danielle LaPorte via Mary Standing Otter highlights other aspects of our interbeing that are simultaneously occurring that are sometimes overlooked,

Something is being invented this year that will change how your generation lives, communicates, heals and passes on…
Some civil servant is making sure that you get your mail, and your garbage is picked up, that the trains are running on time, and that you are generally safe.
Someone is dedicating their days to protecting your civil liberties and clean drinking water.
Someone is regaining their sanity.
Someone is coming back from the dead. 
Someone is genuinely forgiving the seemingly unforgivable.
Someone is curing the incurable.

For all the heart-breaking realities present in the world, giving birth to a child is an affirmation that despite its many hardships, challenges, and the probability of suffering, life is immensely precious. Around us everywhere we have reminders of the long roots and branches of life that allow us to stand beneath their arms and marvel at the wonder of life. 

All of us living now will someday become ancestors. I ask myself, what kind of ancestor do I want to be? What am I doing now to participate in creating the kind of world I will pass on and the stories that will be told? Walking under the ancient limbs of the Angel Oak, leaning into its trunk I sensed the astonishing thing it is to be alive. I hope to pass on that sense of wonder and the knowledge that life is a gift.

As Mary Oliver wrote in her poem, “When Death Comes,”

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

music, poetry, Uncategorized, Wonder

Seeing With the Eyes of the Heart

annacitrino
Honu Green Sea Turtle, Hawaii, painting on silk, Ann Pervinkler, photo Tim Pervinkler

“Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.” –Robin Wall Kimmerer

Sometimes, it takes a long time to see something. Maybe you’ve looked at something before and recognized it, but really seeing it can be a different thing altogether. Painting on silk, as Ann Pervinkler does, the artist has to pay attention to shape, angle, blending of color and use of space, but more than that, an artist wants what she’s painting to come alive–to have spirit and life. When I saw Ann’s turtle pillow, I felt the turtle was swimming right to me, and immediately thought of my experience some years back while snorkeling beside a turtle in Sri Lanka.

When I first saw the turtle, I was elated since I’d never before swam so closely alongside such a large turtle. It seemed the size of a small, round picnic table! It moved through the water with grace and ease. Close enough to easily touch the turtle, I began to see it in a new way. You can watch this video version of the poem as I read it to the accompaniment of Kanako Fukumoto on the violin and Satsuki Fujishima on piano, (“Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” by A. Senju/ Kimi wo Shinjite.) The turtle in the video was filmed by Marina Goodyear in Malapascua, Philippines.

The Curious Turtle

She wasn’t like other turtles
plowing along the ocean bottom
tearing up coral with her beak.

She didn’t hide under a rock 
when I swam by for fear of what
I might do. No. 

She held intently her full mouth
of food as the surge swept her.
Trailing a string of bright bubbles
she paddled straight to me, placed
her face with its glistening eye
next to mine and peered into me. 

I stared into her eyes’ gleaming depth,
her gaze a recognition. 
Somehow, she knew me.

The universe spinning through 
its layers of mystery, I’d entered
another world, felt how Eve
must have felt in the garden
before the fall, naked, vulnerable
and scintillatingly alive.

Hawksbill turtle, Seychelles

When we give ourselves to something with our full attention, looking with the eyes of our heart, we see the world anew. As Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote in The Little Prince, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Not a mere backdrop we are moving through, when we look at at something or someone with the eyes of the heart, we become more aware of our interbeing with everything around us, the enormous wonder of reality.

In her 1982 essay, “Living Like Weasels,” Annie Dillard wrote about encountering a weasel and being “stunned into stillness…Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key…the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes.” Dillard’s description is very similar to my experience when the turtle’s eye met mine. I saw a depth there, felt what even might be called a wisdom. No longer merely an animal simply to identify and swim beside. I’d met another being with a history, a presence. When we looked in each other’s eyes, something in me woke up: the turtle’s life had depth and a way of knowing beyond my knowing–and one to learn from. I understood the turtle saw his life equally important to mine with his own interests and pursuits. Reality had expanded.

The encounter with the turtle was a gift, changing the way I see not only turtles, but animals and the natural world as a whole and my relationship to it. We can see the world as objects or we can look into the eyes of the world and see it as a marvel alive with presence.

Artists use their skill to help us see the world with the eyes of the heart to help us recognize the wonder that surrounds us that we might otherwise miss without their assistance in bringing it to our attention. Looking into the eyes of a live turtle paddling by, or into silky turquoise water the turtle Ann Pervinkler’s pillow swims through, or the tree branches rolling with wind along the road as you ride home from work–wherever you find yourself, the world is alive and is speaking. Open the eyes of your heart. Listen.

Maldives

You can explore more of Ann’s silk paintings here.

“The Curious Turtle” appears in my newest book, Buoyant, published by Bellowing Ark Press. If you’d like a copy, contact me and I can send you details of how to order one.

Uncategorized

Inside Yosemite’s Granite Palm

annacitrino
Yosemite, CA

“To become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words…the tangent to the curve of human experience lies beyond the limits of language. The world of things we perceive is but a veil. It’s flutter is music, its ornament science, but what it conceals is inscrutable. Its silence remains unbroken; no words can carry it away. Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear–filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.” — Abraham Joshua Heschel

Standing on Yosemite Valley’s floor with its immense granite walls rising on either side to 4,800 feet is to be immersed in wonder and to step out of one’s self into a place of awed silence, touched by an awareness of a reality far larger than the mind can absorb, a universe more immense than can be imagined, or at least than I am able to grasp.

Yosemite Valley is the physical expression of an astonishing story. Connected to the shifting tectonic continental and oceanic plates moving across each other, granite’s formation is a tremendously long process created twenty-five to thirty miles beneath the earth’s surface where over time, magma cools then slowly rises since it is lighter than the solid rock it is suspended over. Crystals of various minerals form and bond together as the magma lowers in temperature. Some of the world’s largest mountains, the Himalayas and the Andes, are the result of this type of geologic process. The formations in Yosemite Valley, however, are a combination of this process, as well as glacial activity. Ice carrying its load of gravel and rock pushed its abrasive way in and out of the the Valley, a recurring dance that went on for 30,000 years and then ended 11,700 years ago during the Pleistocene Epoch, scouring the Valley into a u-shaped formation. Surface rock eventually wearing away through erosion, the granite domes slowly revealed themselves. Other erosive actions of freezing and thawing carried on, causing sheaves of granite to peel away from the dome’s fissures, creating the sheer faces we see today.

El Capitan, Yosemite Valley

Yosemite is but a part of the three hundred mile long Sierra Nevada baolith, the merger of enormous magma chambers beneath the earth. Pondering the scale of time and the colossal complex processes involved in creating Yosemite Valley and its surrounding area causes one to stand in speechless amazement at life’s vast and intricate processes, of which our passing lives, in all our own incredible mysteriousness, are but a small grain. To place yourself in Yosemite Valley is to allow a ripple of awareness to pass through you, and to touch something of what it means to be human and the miracle of existence.

Maybe humanity is but an afterthought to project Earth and to the galaxy. Whatever the greater reason for humanity’s appearance in this universe, I’m grateful to be a witness to its astounding presence. When driving into the Yosemite Valley, a passenger in the car next to me gazing out the window in astonishment at the scene we were taking in, looked over at me, face aglow, eyes gleaming. Full of joy, our mouths agape, we greeted each other waving vigorously. Later, while bicycling around the valley floor, overwhelmed by the sight my eyes were taking in, I encountered a fellow wanderer walking the opposite way. “We’re alive!” I called out as we grew close. She turned and smiled. In places of such magnificence we sense our common humanity, the desire to express its beauty rising up like a spring overflowing with life’s fountain of incredulous abundance.

Yosemite Valley

The life of a flower is one measurement of time, a human life, another. But places like Yosemite’s granite mountains take us into a realm difficult to comprehend. Granite has a solidity to it. For me, granite brings back memories of boulders I climbed among with my sisters on the hills scattered with these stony outcroppings behind my childhood home. Whether sitting on a boulder staring out over the valley, or lying back and absorbing stored heat inside the rock while staring up at clouds or a circling hawk, granite held a sense of time embodied. Resting on granite, the world slowed down and drew me into its arms. Ursula La Guinn writes in her poem, “Hymn to Time,” Time makes room / for going and coming home / and in time’s womb / begins all ending. Granite rises from both sides of the Yosemite’s Valley floor, creating the sense of being held inside a womb or the curved palm of some great hand where time is fluid, and nothing ever dies but is simply a part of a long spiral of making and remaking.

We need these moments where the immensity of all that is flashes into our consciousness and we see ourselves inhabiting a different realm, one much greater and more expansive than the routines of life or the understandings we walk around in. And we are altered, our sense of reality enlarged. Something in us is moved, a previously unheard music rising inside, whispering a kind of wordless understanding about what it means to be human and alive. I think of these words from Jan Zwicky’s poem, “The Art of Fugue, Part VI,”

Once again, the moment of impossible
transition, the bow, its silent voice
above the string. Let us say
the story goes like this. Let us say
you could start anywhere.
Let us say you took your splintered being
by the hand, and led it
to the centre of a room: starlight
through the floorboards of the soul.
The patterns of your life
repeat themselves until you listen.
Forgive this. Say now
what you have to say.

It is from this place of silent awareness where the music of who we are emerges–some place beyond goals and accomplishments, something to do with the difficult attending to what it means to be, to be present, and for our lives to say what they have to say.

Half Dome, Yosemite
poetry, spirtuality

Standing Under Stones of Suffering and Wonder

annacitrino

Sentence

The body of a starving horse cannot forget the size it was born to.

—Jane Hirshfield

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A few weeks ago, I listened to the rain come down all night and thought about the grief people live with, the suffering that doesn’t go away. In our neighborhood lives a peacock that calls out through day and night. It’s mating season for peacocks, a season that goes on for four months. During this time, the peacock cries out for a mate. There is no peahen in our neighborhood, however, so the peacock’s cries echo down the valley day and night. His calls will never be answered. I hear his calls, and consider how many across the world whose needs for housing, food, clothing, clean water, clean air, or health care are never met. Suffering abounds. To live in this world is to participate in its suffering. How do we meet the suffering in the world and in our own lives? How do we cultivate the strength of spirit to be able to endure the suffering that will inevitably come to us all as we eventually approach our own deaths?

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As Hirshfield’s describes in her short poem above, it feels a kind of punishment or sentence to remember what you once had or could do but are no longer able to because of physical limitations caused by accident, disease, declining health or age. But our lives don’t continue on in the same state over time. Living things change and age. We need to be able to look our own mortality in the face, yet this is very hard to do. We don’t gain inner strength to deal with these changes over night. We need to prepare for it through our lifetime. 

Perhaps we have such difficulty with suffering because little in our culture prepares us to live with it, to understand or to transcend it. We don’t see suffering as as a part of life and don’t know how to learn from it. Most of us want to avoid suffering and reject pain. People prefer to be powerful and strong, not weak and suffering.

When we suffer, we tend to feel reduced and limited. The world shrinks. William Stafford’s poem, “How To Regain Your Soul,” describes a way to respond to suffering that enlarges and renews.

Come down Canyon Creek trail on a summer afternoon
that one place where the valley floor opens out. You will see
the white butterflies. Because of the way shadows
come off those vertical rocks in the west, there are
shafts of sunlight hitting the river and a deep
long purple gorge straight ahead. Put down your pack.

Above, air sighs the pines. It was this way
when Rome was clanging, when Troy was being built,
when campfires lighted caves. The white butterflies dance
by the thousands in the still sunshine. Suddenly, anything
could happen to you. Your soul pulls toward the canyon
and then shines back through the white wings to be you again.

One way to deal with suffering or difficulty the poem suggests, is to wander out into nature because in doing so you enable yourself to view your ills from a broader perspective. As Stafford suggests, in nature we can find a place where the world opens again, and as the poem describes, the shadows you see coming off the hard, sheer places in your life leading toward nightfall and the west are now the very thing enabling you also to see light on the river leading through the canyon walls. This is a place to observe deeply. It’s worth spending time to understand, and the stanza closes by saying, “Put down your pack.” When we suffer, it takes time to absorb the reality that your suffering could also bring you a new life source that will lead you through the rock-walled gorge of your experience. It’s worth spending time being present with this understanding–simply taking it in.

The poem’s second stanza begins with air stirring the pines. Lightness enters in. Breath. When we take time to rest in the awareness of this new state were in, we make space for something new to enter our awareness. Stafford recognizes that world we inhabit may be weighted with heavy gravity. He relates the ancient struggles of Rome and Troy, to the beginnings of human civilization living in caves. The very words Rome and Troy echo with sounds of war. We know struggle and work are part of civilizations’ foundation and history. But these descriptions of civilization’s efforts are held together in the poem’s stanza on either side by air breathing through the pines and light lifting and illuminating the wings of butterflies. Stafford reminds us this is what it is to be human. Heaviness and struggle are required for existence, yes. But present alongside the weight and effort is the magnificence of the larger world–the stunning ephemeral qualities of existence itself–the butterflies dancing in the still sun by the thousands–those resplendent moments where beauty captures and leads us into a place toward the sublime, moments where time seems to stand still, and for an instance we taste what it is to step inside eternity. Caught in an experience of what Abraham Joshua would name as “radical wonder,” the world opens. “Suddenly, anything/ could happen to you,” writes Stafford. We see now how we can inhabit our bodies as our “soul pulls toward the canyon,” the difficult and narrow places. We are are body, and we are spirit–light shining through wings.

We get used to the way things are or have been going along in our lives, and tend to think that is the way it always has been or will be. The earth and everything in it, however, is in a state of transition. At Pinnacles National Park  in California, you can walk past gargantuan boulders and through caves made as a result of volcanic explosions, landslides, the slipping of tectonic plates on the San Andreas Fault, and erosion–both natural and chemical. The result today, millions of years later, is an amazing place of incredible beauty and biodiversity. We want to understand why we suffer and how to be released from suffering. When examining the earth we walk on, however, we can realize that it, too, has endured great change and many other life forms on earth have endured pain as result.

The great Jewish theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel, said,  “We may doubt anything, except that we are struck with amazement. When in doubt, we raise questions; when in wonder, we do not even know how to ask a question. Doubts may be resolved, radical amazement can never be erased. There is no answer in the world to [our] radical wonder. Under the running sea of our theories and scientific explanations lies the aboriginal abyss of radical amazement.” (Man Is Not Alone, p. 13) The result of the fissures, volcanos and erosion is, in the end, great beauty. Maybe instead of seeking an answer to our suffering we want to seek ways to stand under the light breaking through the cracks in our life’s hard and heavy rocks where we can experience wonder.

 

poetry, Wonder

Falling Into Wonder

annacitrino

to my aunt blanche
who rolled from grass to driveway
into the street one sunday morning.

—Lucille Clifton, “Praise Song,”

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Aunt Blanche in Lucille Clifton’s “Praise Song” reminds me of the many times I’ve told myself I’m going to do (or not do) something, only to metaphorically fall off the lawn regarding commitments I had made to myself. Clifton’s poem presents the reader with Aunt Blanche standing in the yard with her family, experiencing the day together. It’s a Sunday, a day of relaxation, and a time to gather with family. Things seem to be going fine until, boom, down goes Aunt Blanche, slipping off the yard and into the street! Clifton explains that Aunt Blanche had a basketball body, indicating her aunt likely hasn’t practiced the habit of healthy eating, or she probably wouldn’t be as round as a basketball. In spite of her love of food, or even perhaps because of it, Aunt Blanche is a resilient woman: basketballs bounce, and this is exactly what Aunt Blanche does; she bounces up from the street, and out of danger’s way.

It’s interesting to note that Aunt Blanche’s family doesn’t run into the street to rescue her. Clifton explains that as a ten year old observing her aunt’s fall, she “understood/ little or nothing of what it meant,” but she had faith in her aunt to get up from the humbling event. “Praise to the faith with which she rose,” writes Clifton, describing her belief in her Aunt’s ability to return to the family. Thankfully, Aunt Blanche has enough wits about her to recognize she was in danger, and works to get her self out of the possibility of further harm from oncoming cars. Drivers, too, see the situation Aunt Blanche is in, and respond by moving out of the way, so as to not harm her. Then, similar to the father who waited for the Prodigal Son to return home, Aunt Blanche’s family, too, waits for her with open arms as she climbs out of the street and rejoins them on the grass: an occasion for praise. The horror that might have happened didn’t. Aunt Blanche sighs a bit, showing her dismay at her own behavior, but doesn’t stay in the road carrying on about how silly she was. Neither does she blame anything or anyone in her situation. She simply gets herself out of danger’s way, and walks back to her family, a place she knows she is safe, a place she belongs. When we fall, rather than judging or blaming, we all want to know there’ll be open arms waiting for us when we rejoin others. As Clifton indicates, such an attitude of acceptance is “like God.”

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People are social beings who need to feel they belong and are respected by those in their group. What stories do we tell ourselves about those experiences where we fall that allows us to bounce back up like Aunt Blanche, dust ourselves off, forgive ourselves, and walk back onto the lawn and continue conversation with others because we understand that in the bigger picture of things, falling is part of the learning process? How might societies as a whole create ways of reacting to those who have fallen so that they can be drawn into the arms of others?

Poet and physician Rafaelo Campo, describes one of those ways in his poem, “What I Would Give.” Many of us carry a fear of falling ill, and Campo’s poem describes the fear people carry when they come to see him for medical help. The poem specifically mentions fears regarding lungs and melanoma, but these are merely examples of the myriad fears we carry with us from day to day: fears that our bodies won’t hold up under the activities we plan to undertake, fears about appearance, fears we won’t complete our work on time or meet people’s expectations, fears about how a new change we are making will affect our family or relationships, so many fears. Campo describes in his poem that what he wants to offer people, though, is “not the usual prescription with/ its hubris of the power to restore,/ to cure.” Perhaps because Campo is not only a doctor but also a poet, he understands that wellness is more expansive than physical wellness alone. It’s also connected to our emotional and social wellbeing, and how these are intertwined with our relationship to the physical environment.

Not all illnesses, aches or pain lead to recovery. If a person has arthritis, for example, she doesn’t get better. The disease progresses. When I see a person walking with a cane, I think of how challenging it is for that person to live with pain and ongoing suffering. Campo’s vision of healing moves beyond the elimination of pain to a wider plane. Even if we can’t be cured, his poem infers, we can be well. How that is possible, Campo suggests, is by opening ourselves to wonder.

I’d like to give them my astonishment
at sudden rainfall like the whole world weeping,
and how ridiculously gently it
slicked down my hair; I’d like to give them that,
the joy I felt while staring in your eyes
as you learned epidemiology
(the science of disease in populations),
the night around our bed like timelessness,
like comfort, like what I would give to them.

IMG_6938These lines show the wisdom of purposefully looking beyond disease and suffering to affirm the gifts abounding around us—to notice what is perhaps commonplace in life, yet amazing: rain falling gently on hair, or joy lighting the eyes of a loved one in the discovery of something new. Campo draws our attention to the idea that wholeness doesn’t have to mean a perfectly attuned body and mind. Healing is a part of a bigger dynamic of how we relate to both the natural world and to those around us. Seeing our connection to the physical world, and delighting in relationships with those around us can enable us to move beyond isolated suffering, and into seeing ourselves as part of the greater whole. It is this “seeing” that makes us whole again, even in our incompleteness. This is the larger healing Campo wants to give. Strength to deal with the pain (and the etymology of “comfort” is to intensify strengthening) comes from finding a way to stay in love with life even amidst struggle and pain. When we let ourselves reconnect to an awareness of life’s enormous gift, we lose ourselves into timelessness. In the process, we find a larger self. Even in the midst of danger, we feel safe, so that even “the night around our bed,” whether a bed of illness leading to death, or the bed of simple sleep, is a place of “comfort.” We can be at home with what is.

All illnesses, discomforts, failures, and “falls,” are opportunities to practice reframing suffering and pain within a wider perspective. Suffering and pain can engender compassion and gratitude, but we have to cultivate those qualities. Some people at an early age are faced with challenges or disabilities requiring them to grapple with how to live with great hardship. To be at home with whatever life gives us is extremely difficult. This is a journey that requires practice, likely years of practice, perhaps a lifetime. When you are ill, you recognize what a gift it is to be well, to be able to walk, to see, to breathe. I lived in a city with air quality so poor that it’s rare to see a cloud or blue sky, as I did for nine years in Delhi, taping the front door each night to reduce the smell of smoke. To see a blue sky filled with clouds large as mountains, for me, is truly a wonder, not a commonplace fact. Practicing gratitude in times of ongoing suffering or pain enables us to recognize we are connected to something bigger than our grief and our pain, and allows us the opportunity to identify with others around the world who suffer too.

Thoreau, in his experiment in living simply at Walden Pond, said he “went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” I want to live deeply. When I work, I give myself to that work fully, but I must remind myself to guard my energy, and practice purposefully widening my view—attending my ear and heart to the possibilities that allow connections to the natural world to surface. I need to practice making room for both work and wonder. “The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living,” writes the Jewish scholar, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and like Heschel, I want to walk in wonder.

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Making Space for Wonder

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“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” –Abraham Joshua Heschel

In a few weeks my husband and I will be headed to Prague where we will be attending a workshop on creativity. To prepare for that workshop, we’ve been asked to go out in hunt for a variety of things we are to take photos of to bring to the conference– spirals in nature, human faces in man made objects, animals in clouds, inanimate objects that appear they are in love, living people who look like they belong to another century, and more. The past couple of weeks I’ve gone out for short walks around the area where I live, looking. Some things are just not easy to find. I thought human faces in man made objects, for instance, wouldn’t be so difficult. My husband’s family has a habit of looking for hidden objects in clouds, knots of wood, the trees. My father in law discovered the Virgin Mary in a whiskey bottle that he found in an abandon lot while out for a walk and had the neighborhood lined up to see it on his mantle. So, there’s a kind of family history in looking closely that we’ve practiced over the years. The results can be surprising.

I’ve had my students go on searches for things, given them a paint chip like ones you might find at the paint store and had them search for a week to see if they could match it with the exact color somewhere out in the world. Another thing I’ve asked them to find is something they think no one else would notice but that they think is interesting. A good part of a writer’s work is to notice things, I explain, things that are in plain sight but hidden because no one is taking time to notice them. A person can notice a lot of amazing things when paying attention. One of those things you might discover or rediscover is wonder. What you find is perhaps not really as important as the search. In the search you can find all kinds of wonders.

Eliot wrote “April is the cruelest month,” but February can definitely be difficult too. For many who live in cold countries, it’s a snowy month–snow stacked so high you’re blinded by the white on white emptiness. With windows blocked by icicles, you know spring is coming–color will eventually return to the streets–but that time seems far off. How do you get through those bleak times? This is where a search cIMG_3931omes in. Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, “Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.” Give yourself something to search for, and wonder might  turn the corner to greet you at an unexpected moment. The other afternoon, I was out walking the campus where I live, looking here and there at things I’ve seen a thousand times, hoping to find a hidden face in an object so I could take a photo to bring to the workshop I mentioned earlier, but I could find nothing. Over and over again, I scrutinized objects. Nothing. I was telling myself, “There are simply no faces anywhere.” I looked down. There on the sidewalk was a face smiling up at me with a grass strand for a lock of hair. I couldn’t believe it! It’s the only face I’ve found so far in various ventures.

February may be cruel in other parts of the world, but is actually the best month if the year in Delhi. Here, February has the least amount of smoke in the air, it’s not too hot or too cold, and there are no dengue carrying mosquitos. What Delhi has a lot of in February are flowers. As I went out hunting for spirals in nature to photograph, I enjoyed looking at the splendid variety of spirals flowers present. From fibonacci spirals to the mandalas of a dahlia, flowers can make your head spin.

It’s not always easy to find what you’re looking for, however. One thing I’ve learned from living in India is that the good and bad, the exquisitely beautiful and the horrible are often side by side, as if they are part of each other. You don’t often get the one with out the other near by. Living here in India also presents questions there are no easy answers for, as I’ve written about before in these blog posts. Suffering is visibly present here. All you have to do is leave your house and go out into the street and you will see it. How to respond to it is constantly challenging.

Today, as I walked through the INA market, I was on the lookout for images of people who look like they could be from another century, as that is one of the things we are to take photos of for our creativity workshop. I saw scenes there that could have been from a past time, but I also saw scenes that make a person very conscious of all the animals sacrificed to meet our hunger. Food is glorious, but it carries with it a great deal of blood,  guts, and stench. Yes there is the beauty of flowers, the fabulous flavors of curried meat, but there is also some horror behind it all. Men torch feathers off fowl, and fur off goat heads. Boys scrub the goat heads in a plastic tub of water. Thwack, the butcher hacks a haunch of meat against a wooden block. A hundred or so chicken feet sit on a tray. Blood runs down the alleyway between shops. It’s all there, along with that beautiful cut of fish you are going to take home and barbecue.

Donald Hall’s poem, “Eating the Pig” describes well the complexity of the horrors that can come alongside the wonders,

and I am drawn to him, my brother the pig,
with his large ears cocked forward,
with his tight snout, with his small ferocious teeth
in a jaw propped open
by an apple. How bizarre, this raw apple clenched
in a cooked face! Then I see his eyes,
his eyes cramped shut, his no-eyes, his eyes like X’s
in a comic strip, when the character gets knocked out.

Then, there he is a few moments later, eating the pig and reveling in its flavor.

For myself, I scoop a portion of left thigh,
moist, tender, falling apart, fat, sweet.
We forage like an army starving in winter

After the pig has been devoured and just the head remains, he can’t help but feel a friendly affection for it and finds himself reaching out to pet it behind the ear as if might purr. As he does so, he sees his connection to the pig. He leans into the pig and whispers,

I take into myself, and digest,
wheat that grew between
the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.

It’s not just this pig alone, it’s the way eating the pig connects him back to who we are before the time of empires–all the way back to prehistory. The poem ends by saying,

“Fire, brother and father,
twelve of us, in our different skins, older and younger,
opened your skin together
and tore your body apart, and took it
into our bodies.”

There is a reverence for the pig, a recognition for how consuming the animal roasted in this ancient, barbaric ritual connects him to both the pig and to human kind. Life is both full of wonder and horror simultaneously, and this poem clearly demonstrates the paradox.

One weekend morning a couple of weeks back, we opened the bedroom curtain and there sat a monkey eating the tomatoes off of our plant in the window box. (No wonder we’ve had so few tomatoes this year!) The other day a monkey got into our compost box that we have on our balcony and then smeared his hands across the kitchen window. Two days ago I looked out the window of my classroom to see two monkeys walking across the roof of the building opposite me, only to appear in the courtyard below a few minutes later. You can go along for years without barely a monkey surfacing anywhere. Things seem fine, and then suddenly, there they are, monkeys jumping on your roof, tramping through your garden, and getting into whatever they can. When a monkey is around you’ve got to be careful because you never know what they are up to.

It’s good to be aware of holding both the difficult things in balance–the days with the monkeys vs. the weeks and months without them, as well the truly wondrous moments that come along. Actually doing this takes practice. When things grow dull or difficult, when struggle or white snow is all that can be seen, we have to purposefully change our perspective so we don’t feel crushed under the weight. That’s hard. But we don’t have to wait until things become unbearable. For a few moments we can break the routine of work, we can lift ourselves out of a situation that feels full or sorrow or dread. There’s a variety of ways to do it. We can sing, walk out the door and notice the trees or birds, arrange some fruit in a bowl to give away, put on some music, dance around the room, push our hands in the garden soil, pull some weeds or pick some flowers. A paint chip or a spiral, a face in the cloud–it doesn’t have to be something big. It just needs to be something; something to take us out of ourselves and connect us to something bigger. Who knows what you will actually discover in the process. It might not be what you intended. Doing that something can help us nurture joy and wonder while at the same time continuing to recognize the realness of the struggle or sorrow that we continue to live alongside. Maybe it is this very sorrow and struggle we know so well that allows us to experience the depth of joy when we give ourselves to it, or when it comes along to surprise us like the smiling face in the cement. We know then how precious such joy truly is.

Beauty, pilgrimage, Uncategorized

Quiet Moments With Clouds

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photo 2-3Frequently this summer I’ve been looking at clouds, the way they grow and contract before my eyes, sometimes so imperceptibly I wonder if it’s happening, other times so rapidly I wonder how they can do it. Gazing at the sky may seem like a mundane thing to do, but I recall many a time as a child lying back on the chairs outside my house and watching them glide by for hours, morphing forms as they paraded by as if on a slow moving carousel.

There was something soothing about those quiet afternoons. They carried me into a place, that looking back on it now, I can describe as a place of communion. Like staring at a campfire, the experience enabled me to enter a state where the world dropped away and I was absorbed into the moment, fully present in the simplicity of being. I call it a state of communion because even now, years later, while cloud gazing I find myself entering the same place in the mind and body, connecting with the environment where words aren’t needed, nevertheless communication is happening. I see the images, color, shapes–they are all showing themselves to me and something in myself is responding with more than a mere physical reaction. I hold and behold the forms, and in doing so, I am learning about the changing nature of the world and how I participate in beauty.

Though I gazed at clouds more often as a child, still today when I look up at the sky after waking up or as I walk home from work, something in me longs for the the open sky I experienced as a child, the vast, spacious world the mind can wander in. A hazy, flat sky flattens the mind. On days when the haze lifts, my heart feels freer, more content and at home. It’s refreshing to be reminded that shapes can also have forms with soft edges that float.

Our connections to the environment we grow up with influence who we become and leave an indelible mark. The house my father built and that I lived in as a child in San Diego county was perched high on a hill looking over a wide valley. We lived in a rural area with hills rimming the distant horizon, a geographical location that shaped my soul, so to speak: Living there nurtured a value of open space and encouraged in me the qualities of observation, reflection, and of taking the long view of things, values fundamental to my understanding of the world.

photo 3-2Earlier this summer I was recovering from a knee injury. Because moving around was slow and uncomfortable, all walking became a focused effort, each step a meditation. Immediately the world felt smaller and more challenging as a result. There seemed to be so much I couldn’t do, and I was surprised by how vulnerable and limited the injury made me feel. During that time, I was visiting my brother. I rested on his deck one morning, looking up into the enormous billowy clouds. Once again the world grew into itself, the largeness of it stretching out with the length of sky like an enormous blue sheet hung out across the universe, shifting in the solar breeze. Little had actually changed except my perception. I couldn’t move any faster than before, but staring at the passing clouds reminded me of the larger reality I was a part of, and brought me back to that place of wonder I participated in as a child. Just as clouds change forms, so does my life, and any suffering I might experience. Any suffering I might know, however small or big, is just a part of the larger suffering of the world. In the world there is pain, but there is also great beauty. Both coexist, and reality is a state of flow between them in different measures.

Not all of us live continuously in a world with natural beauty. I know I don’t. Countless others are like me–those who live in smog choked cities, those without access to green space and parks or who spend most their time in rooms without windows working under fluorescent light. Though we may not have access to it, the world’s immense beauty continues on. When I am in a place with natural beauty, I want to really notice it, pausing to take it in, to be thankful, and to consider all the processes of nature it took to create what I am experiencing. I want to remember often how open skies and time spent beholding them can restore.

When I am in a place that lacks beauty, when I find myself living there, I can also look up at the sky and know that beauty’s absence I that place will help me to recognize how precious beauty is when and wherever it is found. I can let this awareness fill me with gratitude that I have seen beauty, have beheld it, and hopefully do so again in the future.

I am reminded of Wendell Berry’s Sabbath’s 1999 poem, and how it values the small, quiet moments, emphasizing the importance of noticing and learning to rest in them, moments like looking at clouds.

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VII

by Wendell Berry

Again I resume the long
lesson: how small a thing
can be pleasing, how little
in this hard world it takes
to satisfy the mind
and bring it to its rest.

Within the ongoing havoc
the woods this morning is
almost unnaturally still.
Through stalled air, unshadowed
light, a few leaves fall
of their own weight.

The sky
is gray. It begins in mist
almost at the ground
and rises forever. The trees
rise in silence almost
natural, but not quite,
almost eternal, but
not quite.

What more did I
think I wanted? Here is
what has always been.
Here is what will always
be. Even in me,
the Maker of all this
returns in rest, even
to the slightest of His works,
a yellow leaf slowly
falling, and is pleased.

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Educating the Heart

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Many people today are thinking and writing about the way technology is changing our brain. At the same time, there is an explosion of research about the brain itself. One of the things that is becoming clear and clearer, at least for me, as I attempt to follow the understanding about the brain research that is coming out, is how connected the brain is to the heart. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson, for example, explains the interaction between the heart and brain, and how emotions create hormones that effect our body’s well- being. When people learn to regulate their stress hormones, says Davidson, they experience better physical health, and have less working memory performance problems. Learning calm yourself, can help you improve your emotional well-being and cognition. The Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education is one place that is working toward “integration of the mind, body, and spirit.” Their motto is “Educate the Heart”.  People can learn to embody and practice social and emotional skills to help make the world a more compassionate place, as well as one that is fair or that runs efficiently.

One of the books I’m currently reading, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, the Conflict Between Word and Image, by Leonard Shlain, explores the thought-provoking theory that the written alphabet dramatically changed the brain, and that as written literacy increased, so did people’s intolerance for those different from themselves. Laws and civic institutions can benefit us in many ways, but as Shlain describes, they can also “become the instrument of tyranny.” Writing is a wonderful thing. It allows us to carry knowledge from one generation to the next, it gives us the opportunity to explore our thoughts, and express our imagination.  On the other hand, Shlain describes the enormous value of the irrational, “Archaic people considered irrationality coequal with reason…Laughter is irrational. Faith is irrational. Watching a sunset is an irrational act. There is no demonstrable “purpose” involved. The appreciation  of both art and beauty are irrational: logic cannot completely explain why a work of art is compelling; the experience is essentially ineffable…All acts of altruism are inherently irrational. Yet who among us would want to eliminate…(these) from our lives? Like irrationality itself, they contribute to the sumptuous, verrigated texture of the human condition.”

I would say that there is a kind of rationality to altruistic acts in that they bind our hearts to others and create a sense of belonging and community, nevertheless, I believe Shlain has a point. Not everything in our life has to be measured in rational terms, and in fact, those things most meaningful to us in our lives–our relationships to others–are not something we want to go around measuring constantly. It could kill the relationship.

Yesterday, as I was walking across the street, I looked up into the sky and noticed there were what appeared to be thousands of dragonflies swarming the air. Above them enormous clouds billowed up in an Everest height. Dark underneath and whiter on top, the clouds opened in the center into wide vistas and canyons of space. Birds–kites, pigeons, crows, swirled in the sea of sky. The world seemed to be virtually swimming in tremendous pool of energy and life. This kind of experience is rare and raw beauty, given as a gift–unmeasurable, and nearly indescribable. I had merely to look up and absorb it, as it lifted me out of myself into a moment of awe, connecting me with the vastness of the universe. Author, Fredrich Beuchner, tells how “ . . some moment happens in your life that you say yes right up to the roots of your hair, that makes it worth having been born just to have happen, laughing with somebody till the tears run down your cheeks, waking up to the first snow, being in bed with somebody you love… whether you thank God for such a moment or thank your lucky stars, it is a moment that is trying to open up your whole life. If you turn your back on such a moment and hurry along to business as usual, it may lose you the ball game. If you throw your arms around such a moment and hug it like crazy, it may save your soul.”

Moments of awe make me feel alive. Everything contains wonder, can become mysterious again–bigger, unknowable, if we have eyes to see it, if we allow ourselves to enter that place of being in our minds? The wide sky and swirling birds, your child sleeping in the room next door, your parents’ love touching you now–reaching from all the way back through the years of your childhood, your breath rhythmically persisting without ever having to be directed– all of these, and a thousand other experiences are examples tinged with wonder where we can allow ourselves to let go into an awareness of life’s great gift.

Encounters with death, too, can be moments to bring us back into an awareness of wonder. Steve Jobs explains in this short video, that knowing he was going to die was the best tool he encountered to enable him to realize what is truly important in life. “All external expectations–pride, fear of embarrassment and failure fall away in the face of death. There is no reason not to follow your heart,” says Jobs.

Dragonflies in many parts of the world are considered a symbol of change whose source is based in a deeper understanding and insight of life that comes from looking beyond the surface. All those dragonflies with their eyes that see 360 degrees swirling beneath the open window of sky, maybe it’s the universe’s way of saying, “Open your heart. Walk out a bit further into the unknown, the irrational, and dare to learn more of what it is you are here on earth for. Buechner in Now and Then, a Memoir of Vocation, says, “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” This week, I want to consciously take moments in my day to look for wonder, and to open my heart to the world.

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Experiencing Awe and Wonder

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A couple of evenings ago, my husband and are were sitting in the hot tub in a clearing under the redwoods outside our back door talking, when out of the edge of the trees came a deer. She stood there, ears perked, staring straight at us. Immediately, we went silent, our eyes fixed on the deer, her form subtly outlined somewhere between visible and invisible. We have seen this deer maybe four times in the past week or so. She comes up into the clearing, pauses, looks at us, waits for her fawn to follow, or sends it on ahead, then bounds along the edge of the trees a bit, perhaps pausing to nibble at a branch or two, before disappearing down the embankment and deeper into the trees. When the deer appeared again last night however, she didn’t move on. She continued to look at us for what was probably 15 minutes while we sat very still observing her observing us. Occasionally she moved, looking to the sides of the clearing, and later lowering her head slightly, as if in a bow. Not knowing what this meant, we lowered our heads slight too, bowing in return. Later that night,  I read that deer lower their heads down as if to eat if it senses danger, and then jerk it back up again abruptly when in danger, hoping the predator will give away its position. We weren’t predators, though, so had nothing to give away.

As we continued staring in silence at each other, I couldn’t help but think of Annie Dillard’s essay, “Living Like Weasels” where Dillard describes looking into the weasel’s eyes and she is “stunned into stillness,” and this is how we, too, felt. Dillard describes how her eyes were locked with the weasel’s. In our case, it was too dark to see the deer’s eyes, but this kind of precise vision of each other wasn’t necessary. Our presence mesmerized each other. I don’t know what the deer was thinking, if she was simply curious about us, afraid, or some other thing. What is the mind of a deer like, I can’t understand. She was free to move on, but didn’t. Dillard explains how her encounter with the weasel helped her realize how she would like to learn how to live totally present in the act of living as a weasel does.  “I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you,” she explains. Such encounters in nature as these throw us out of our humdrum expectations about life or about what will happen next, and enable us to become suddenly aware of our connection to the universe of being. We are in awe, aware of our senses, fully present in the moment, conscious we are alive. This, for me, is one of the important reasons I am alive–to experience the wonder of being!

Moments of awe are rare, which makes me curious if awe requires certain conditions for it to appear. Is awe rare because we are so concerned with our schedules and chores that we don’t notice world around us as alive with the potential to fill us with wonder? Is it because we aren’t often out in wild places where we might be more likely to experience the presence of nature’s raw or intense moments? Art, music, and experiences in nature can all be possible ways awe emerges. Though most of us don’t often do we have the opportunity to witness the kind of art that stops us short because of its power to make us see ourselves or life so precisely, maybe we want to do more to cultivate an open awareness of life where awe can surface naturally. Could we, for example, practice noticing things on a particular walk we take every day from and to a particular location and begin to ask questions about what is there?

A couple of examples of things in nature that have the potential to evoke awe are found as video links in Vicki Zakraewski article, “How Awe Can Help Students Develop Purpose”. Interestingly, Dacher Keltner from the Greater Good, has found in his recent research that experiences of awe have the potential to feel less self-centered and act more empathetically. Empathy could go a long way in helping people gain the insight into each other’s worlds in ways that could help us live together more cooperatively and meaningfully.

Unrelated to power and control, wonder and awe require a stance toward the world that is open and receptive. The deer I observed in hushed scintillated silence in my backyard turned away with a snort when she heard a rustle in the bushes, but those moments in her presence made me aware of the wonder it is to simply be alive. The Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “Mankind will not perish for want of information; but for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.”