Wondering

“If our religion is based on wonder

our chief emotion is gratitude.”

                                            Carl Gustav Jung

Wonder. The gift of looking at something with awe and expectancy.  Different than an Easter egg hunt, where you are looking for it out there somewhere. Rather, wonder is something you carry with you, it’s more like an attitude, like planning to be surprised. Wonder is an inside attribute. Interestingly, carrying it around, seems to contribute to it happening. It’s like the world notices and preens before it. Wondering is a form of enchantment. Wonder makes ordinary magic more palpable. Some strange reflective something that puts things in focus, while shifting them onto the spectrum of awe. A life sentence, but of luminescence!

I woke-up recently to this form of noticing. I literally was assaulted with gratitude in my bed. It’s hard to know when awakening actually took place. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t deserve it, call for it, intend it, pray or meditate. It just invaded my soul.

I’d like to live this way. Perhaps, I will. Stranger things have happened.  I feel myself making a home for wonder, but it seems too wild to settle in one place. How does one hold what cannot be held? I am dying to find out.

Recently, I remembered a visit to Chaco Canyon. It was during a vacation with my second wife. Our “Rocks and Ruins Tour.” We pulled off the highway near Durango, and drove 30 miles of dirt road, to a place where wondering was a religion. We, being so sophisticated, didn’t know it at the time. While visiting the ruins of an ancient culture I went down into a Kiva. Maybe there, I got infected with wonder, but what seemed like a hole in the ground, held some kind of essence that enchanted me. I was inducted into a world beyond any I knew. Apparently, some forms of wonder have a long shelf life. Like an ancient tick, it jumped on me.

Now, I’m infected. I regularly view the preposterous as a possibility. Ungrounded as I am, in a disabled body, I get strange messages from what I encounter. Medicine moments arrive unbidden. Reality contorts. The world is full of horror and miracles. Sometimes, they are alike, and I wonder even harder.

My intention, as I sat down to write this, was to extoll the virtue of wonder, to marvel at how aging seems to enhance the probability of experiencing it, to genuflect before a world that contains it. What I’m discovering is that as soon as I realized I knew enough, to know, I knew practically nothing, wonder started flooding in. It turns out, that what I don’t know, opened the flood gates. 

I am blessed to be the rare shut-in, who gets to know wonder, in my interactions with others on the computer. Cyber groups have become visits to Kiva’s. The sacred wonder of meeting on-line. Something happens, that no one expects, but everyone hopes for. One can feel a subtle avalanche occurring, Connection, seemingly made by cyber-gods, takes place. Where actually, it is the power of wonder bringing us all back into an awareness of what has always been true. Connection is, and wonder is one way of broadcasting that recognition.

Yes, gratitude rises with it. I am flushed with I can’t say enough, nor can I be silent enough, to really acknowledge what I am experiencing. I guess, I have little real choice, I have to live it out. Wonder has overcome me, and shown me both sides of this inexplicable world. I am thrilled and I am terrified. I guess that means I’m alive. Wonder of wonders!