Tag: awe

Cultivating Wonder

Rachel Henry2 Comments

Apparently Einstein didn’t say, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is,” but I’m grateful someone did, someone who understood the power of wonder.

There are so many reasons to allow existence to elicit wonder from us.

I recently came across an excerpt from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in which she details the extraordinary complexity of a goldfish that she bought for twenty-five cents, his “completely transparent and all but invisible” ventral fins and his eyes that “can look before and behind himself.” Even a single-celled organism contains an entire, intricate world. As the psalmist says, “I will praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

Marveling at the beauty in front of our eyes or beneath our fingertips is one of surest paths to joy. The Buddhist metta meditation recognizes our fundamental desire to be happy. Letting ourselves be amazed at a crab burrowing into the sand or the capabilities of the latest technology fulfills one of our deepest needs by increasing our capacity for joy.

Or consider the overwhelmingly small odds that each of us exists at all. The sperm that made you basically had to win the Powerball lottery to reach that particular egg, and that’s true for every generation on your mom and dad’s sides. Then there’s the almost impossible matter of life evolving, not to mention atoms forming. (See this nifty infographic if you want to know exactly how many zeroes we’re talking about.)

Wonder is a way of life, a means by which to relate to the rest of creation. To be is to be in relationship, Cyprian Consiglio and others have said. What kind of relationship do we want to be in?

To recognize all of existence for the miracle it is puts us in touch with the divinity of everything and everyone around us. To be awestruck by that with which we are relating affirms and expands the life of the other. It’s a way of saying, “May you be.” What could be more essential than to give life to our fellow miracles?

Allow the Moment

Rachel Henry2 Comments

Every now and then, it would be a good idea for me to listen to myself. I often repeat Jim Finley’s description of our lives as “infinite love infinitely giving itself away as every breath and heartbeat,” but I rarely pause to experience this contraction of the ventricles right now, this surge of oxygen into the air sacs as infinite love.

Every day I find a thousand reasons not to walk around in complete awe of that reality. How have I convinced myself that passing concerns, whatever they may be, are more real than the miracle of existence?

I had some help, of course. Our culture teaches us to buy more stuff instead of being blown away by the gift of our lives. It urges us to have everything figured out and be right rather than discover what each moment is teaching us.

I don’t mean a lesson about what we’ve been doing wrong or how we need to improve; I mean an entry way into ever deeper love. We have to let our lives do the teaching, though. We can only bring what we already know and the limited world that we can imagine. If we continually look within our own narrow vision for the horizons the universe is offering, we’ll miss seeing anything new.

There is so much that we cannot imagine, so much that’s eager to reveal itself to us. We need to allow our gaze to be directed. If we can let the moment open for us, like an iris unfurling, rather than wrapping it tightly within our own ideas, the genuine newness of all that is will enter our minds and hearts.

Infinite love by its very nature must always be giving itself away, must always be and be making new. If we can allow it to open us up, we will discover ourselves.

 

Seeing the “Endlessly Precious”

Rachel Henry5 Comments

Sometimes amazing things happen. As I was getting ready to leave New Camaldoli Hermitage, a kind staff member recommended driving north a few miles before returning home because Big Sur is mostly empty right now.

After some hesitation I realized I would likely never have this stretch of coastline to myself in quite the same way as on this Monday afternoon with the main road, Highway 1, still closed to through traffic in both directions because of mudslides.

Heading toward a famous waterfall, I saw an incredibly large bird in the sky and pulled over, hoping it was a condor. As I walked toward a clearing, it came swooping by, soaring out over the ocean, and was soon joined by a second condor flying in those graceful circles over land and sea. A couple of times they came so close overhead that I could hear their wings and read the number on the tags biologists use to track all California condors.

When a bird with a ten-foot wingspan beats his wings as he—or she—passes overhead and you hear a sound you’ve never heard before and may never again, the magnificence of life makes itself felt. But if we choose to, we can live awestruck at life on a daily basis.

It’s easier to have our breath taken away when the beauty and ruggedness of the world are pressing in on us, and we need those encounters with wildness. At the same time, we can remember that something amazing is always happening.

As my friend said about her growing puppy, how does her paw know to make more paw? Though we can explain the molecular and cellular processes to answer that question, the explanation in no way diminishes the wonder that it happens, that RNA exists at all much less differentiates hair cells from muscle cells and puts them in the right place. And how astonishing that we can know these microscopic processes.

Living in wonder is a matter not only of taking the time to drive north and pull over to the side of the road but also of recognizing that every moment is as sacred as the ones spent with the condors. “There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious,” says Abraham Heschel in The Sabbath: its meaning for modern man.

It’s so, so easy to forget what we’ve been given, but every tick of the clock is another chance to remember and rejoice.

Rachel Henry2 Comments

There are small mysteries in this life, like why no one can create a generic Ban-Aid that actually sticks to your skin. Then there are the larger mysteries.

Like this one: Did you know that for every kernel in an ear of corn, there’s a strand of silk that brings the pollen to that kernel? Each individual kernel is important enough to warrant its very own pollen delivery system.

corn plant showing silk
By Pollinator at en.wikipedia, from Wikimedia Commons

Those tufts of silk coming out the top of an ear of corn don’t appear all that well organized. It seems altogether possible that one if not many strands would be missed, yet in all the corn I’ve eaten in my life, I’ve seen very few unpollinated kernels. And it’s not as if corn sellers can pick out the cobs with a few unpollinated kernels here and there.

I don’t think understanding the corn fertilization mechanism down to the mitochondria or the molecular exchange across cell walls reduces the mystery of such an intricate system—for every ear in the history of corn!—one bit. If anything, the biological complexity provides more of a sense of wonder, one more opportunity to say how on Earth did it develop the ability to do that?

We sometimes think that if we know the how, we understand the whole, and if we understand it, there’s nothing to marvel at anymore. If we can explain it, we’ve mastered it, and it’s no longer worthy of the same level of respect. We can move on to figuring out the next thing.

But I think that the more we know, the more amazing and mysterious something can become. Corn silk can be transformed from those annoying strings that insist on clinging to your corn to a source of life. How cool is that?

Awed and Amazed

Rachel Henry1 Comment

It’s been a cup runneth over kind of summer on the Central Coast.

A couple of weeks ago a friend and I met by the beach to talk about writing and ended up bird watching. A swarm—yes, a swarm, as in way beyond a flock—of sooty shearwaters had turned a large patch of ocean brown. They couldn’t have been more than 100 yards off shore.
thousands of sooty shearwaters on the water
At some point, we figured we’d had our evening’s worth of magnificence and turned away, only to be lured back by the number of birds, their closeness, the constant splashes of pelicans fishing. I felt both the desire to and the impossibility of taking it all in.

At the same time, a few whales took up residence in Avila Bay and were kind enough to let the human world know about it by sticking their heads out of the water to feed, breaching, and jumping. I didn’t see the whales, but I did see some phenomenal pictures. A friend who did see them spoke of trying to leave several times and being pulled back to watch some more, much as we had been with the birds.

There’s a lot in life that’s just too big or too wonderful to absorb. Part of my brain wanted to hold onto and process all of those birds, to sort them or comprehend them. But what kept us watching wasn’t the possibility of comprehension.

Knowing exactly how many birds there were or understanding why the fish they were after had come so close to shore wouldn’t have improved the experience. If you measured every detail and understood every interaction at every moment, all that knowledge would not add up to the sense of sheer magnitude and wonder those birds inspired.

I’m blown away by nature on a fairly regular basis, but occasionally she pulls out the stops and reminds me that, when it comes to awe, she has an almost infinite repertoire.