Train of Wonders
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The pandemic calls us to turn inward, to look inside ourselves, to return to the heart and ask ourselves: what is essential in our lives? What do you think the virus is calling you to do?
Our lives have been turned inside out by the pandemic. “Being inside” is now a civic duty, a service to one's self, to others, and to the world. For me, going inside is the most natural direction. I remember a rainy day looking out the window and proclaiming to my Mother that I was bored. She was busy or did not want to deal with it and chastised me. I felt hurt. I stiffened and stood there determined not to cry when I suddenly became fascinated by a water droplet running down the window pane. It darted down a few inches and then stopped, hung there for a few seconds, then again another short distance and hung there. I noticed other drops do similar moves and suddenly, one slipped down the whole glass surface in a squiggly line and I felt the rush of it. I began to imagine the drops were in a race and I was the announcer. I have rarely been bored since then.
If Mom had engaged me, had rewarded my boredom with her attention, I might not have learned how to use boredom as a signal to engage a kind of exquisite attention; it was another lesson in the gradual awakening of myself to the subtle power of wonder. Wonder is both a state and an action. A state of wonder serves as a frame or attitude toward the world, a way of perceiving—a wide-eyed peek out on life in the moment as if it is fresh and new. Wondering, as an action, a wondering, it is an engagement with something or about something with curiosity and openness—I wonder how that moment changed my life?
I love tracking tiny shifts in the world, imagining how a caterpillar's body moves lifting and lowering as it undulates its way across the pavement; or what it feels like to be a shapeshifting cloud drifting slowly across the sky, or how the wind might feel in the outstretched wing feathers of a hawk as it arcs in a circle high above; or how the faint rumble of morning traffic can sound like river rapids in the distance. And these things are always with me, in my memory, and can fill my mind’s eye even while I am sipping coffee and typing this note. To live once is not enough. You only get a tiny window of time to skim those suspect surfaces. But, with reflection and with imagination, you can feel the rush of a single drop of water running down a window pane even 60 years later.
