The spaciousness of wonder

developing a vocabulary to live differently on this generous earth

Bay sunset, A.C.

Hello and welcome friends, familiar and new. I’m Jan and I live in a house that we are renovating in a forest. I hold spaces for those on journeys of transformation. I believe story is powerful and that the earth offers healing through our daily connection and herbal allies. Let’s create a little alchemy together. You are so welcome here. My Sunday posts are always free and you may find it easier to read online as some email clients have a length limit.

What does wonder mean to you?

When we pause to savour a moment,  a view,  a place, or time spent with someone we love, we open to so much — to connection certainly, and also to wonder. Wonder is foundational not only to our myths and rituals but also to our care of the earth that cradles us.

Wonder is our greatest antidote to self destruction

Rachel Carson wrote.

Sometimes wonder comes to us in extraordinary places, as it did to Charles Darwin in the late 1830s when he stopped his voyage for repairs in Chile and crossed the Andes with the aid of mules. Despite hardship and altitude sickness, reaching the top of the mountains filled him with a sense of the awe. 

In his memoir, A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World, Darwin remembered: 

When near the summit, the wind, as generally happens, was impetuous and extremely cold. On each side of the ridge we had to pass over broad bands of perpetual snow, which were now soon to be covered by a fresh layer. When we reached the crest and looked backwards, a glorious view was presented. The atmosphere resplendently clear; the sky an intense blue; the profound valleys; the wild broken forms: the heaps of ruins, piled up during the lapse of ages; the bright-coloured rocks, contrasted with the quiet mountains of snow, all these together produced a scene no one could have imagined. Neither plant nor bird, excepting a few condors wheeling around the higher pinnacles, distracted my attention from the inanimate mass. I felt glad that I was alone: it was like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in full orchestra a chorus of the Messiah.

Wonder transforms our view, sometimes through encounters like Darwin's, sometimes in simpler encounters. Recently  walking through woodland, a pair of jays transported me as they danced the air in joy. At other times wonder comes from a life event. It might be the birth of a child or, as in the case of the poet John Burnside, who sadly died recently, through surviving an illness like Covid:

Six days after I was supposed to die, I went home — and though I had  only been gone a week, everything had changed. Suddenly, in the yards  and gardens that lined the road, it was summer; the street trees were  leafing up, and here and there on the new estates a Japanese cherry, or a flowering almond, stood resplendent in its own tight plot of emerald  lawn. One in particular caught my eye, a blowsy, spreading Shirofugen cherry that immediately brought Potter’s blossomiest blossom remark to mind. I had driven this road a thousand times, but it had never looked so beautiful.

Wonder can also come to us while doing something mundane like drinking a cup of herbal tea, washing a dish or cutting vegetables. We are momentarily transported by savouring the instant, the deep intuition of the connection of all things.

Ella Frances Sanders, writing in Eating the Sun, says:

A sense of wonder can find you in many forms, sometimes loudly, sometimes as a whispering, sometimes even hiding inside other feelings — being in love, or unbalanced, or blue.  

For me, it is looking at the night for so long that my eyes ache and I’m stuck seeing stars for hours afterwards, watching the way the ocean sways itself to sleep, or as the sky washes itself in colors for which I know I will never have the words — a world made from layers of rock and fossil and glittered imaginings that keeps tripping me up, demanding I pay attention to one leaf at a time, ensuring I can never pick up quite where I left off.

What seems common to many experiences of wonder is the act of slowing down and, often, being solitary or in a space of deep trust where we can forget ourselves.

There is not much room for ego in wonder, but instead a feeling of coming home to our authenticity whilst having deep regard for the whole universe. At its heart there is always the sense of what Iris Murdoch called 'unselfing'. The ability to get out of our own way, trust our hearts and not be at the mercy of chattering internal voices is a gift of wonder.

In a world rendered increasingly fragile by our species' acts of voracity and violence, we need wonder. As Terry Tempest Williams, writes:

When we live with wonder and awe, when we begin to make deep connections and have the courage to live in questions rather than answers, then we revere life, all life and become part of the resistance to the erosion, even extinction, of that life.

And Anne Lamott puts it like this in Bird by Bird:

In order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? … Think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. Think of those times when you’ve read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone’s soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of — please forgive me — wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious.

We need a vocabulary of wonder in order to develop a different story of what it might mean to live on this generous earth.

What are your experiences of wonder? 

How do they feed your writing and your life?