Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [80]
Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees has spent a life at the crossroads where species, cultures, beliefs, and the unknown collide and find both dissonance and resonance. Based on the Seven Directions Practice that she developed over the course of twenty-five years, and with the input and guidance of indigenous elders, her current work, Practice for Living/Living Practice, helps humans re-orient to our indigenous mind and regenerate our essential relationship with the earth’s wisdom. For more information about her work visit www.ktwotrees.com.
CHAPTER SIX
Balanced Engagement
Wonder: A Practice for Everyday Life
MUNJU RAVINDRA
When driven to the brink of despair by heartbreak—whether personal or planetary (the despair, in my experience, feels the same), I take it as a kind of daily practice to notice, to bear witness, to look. Look. Again.
The way midday light shines through a drooping fern, so that the spores underneath transform into stars. The dark glossy “waiting-ness” of an empty pre-dawn parking lot. Rain drops clinging to the undersides of branches, lined up like pearls waiting to be plucked … They will dry when the sun emerges, but in the meantime, I uncover their ephemeral beauty, simply by noticing it. By looking. By looking again.
I marvel also at the whimsical efforts other humans have made so that I, so that you, can experience delight: the meticulous placement of stones across a neighborhood stream; the quirky grottos and rock seats in an urban greenhouse; the raucous display in a downtown toy store window; the careful preparation of an elegant meal. We build these gardens because we know, by some kind of prior knowledge, that even in a world made completely virtual, the key to our survival is wonder. I think often of Thoreau’s famous line, now gracing t-shirts sold in earnest coffee shops: ‘in wildness is the preservation of the world.’ Let us dare, for a moment, to rewrite the master: in wonder is the preservation of the soul.
That’s a mighty task for a little word, and frankly, a mighty task for you and me. Caught up in our work, in our activism, in our endless efforts to put the world right; caught up, even, in remembering our own selves; it is easy to walk past the puffed-up spring chickadee balancing awkwardly on the end of a branch. But when we look at him anew, with attention, we can see the world for a moment through the eyes of innocence, and magic starts to blossom all around us. It is this, I believe, that is the art of worldly wonder—it is an attitude to daily life. I think of it as a kind of yoga of everyday life.
Why Wonder?
Sometimes, for an instant or two, I worry that wonder is a copout. In the face of environmental catastrophe, climate change, torture, famine, and war, what does wonder do to change the world? It is not, at first blush, a glaringly activist choice. But, working on wonder has several important effects:
For one, it re-instills in each of us a sense of what is “true,” thereby enhancing our resilience in times of crisis, sorrow, and the general impossible-ness of getting things done. For me, wonder is a flush feeling—a sensation of enlarging, of filling with space, of making room for experience or revelation. I suspect this is how some folks encounter God. Wonder connects me to something larger than myself and gives me the energy I need to keep on agitating. It also gives me the reason.
Working on wonder stretches and strengthens our “wonder muscle,” enabling us to pass along the gift. As a child, I was taken to Europe, to India; I saw poverty and despair as well as the extraordinary manifestations of human creativity. At home in Canada, my mother encouraged me to run un-fettered through the woods behind our house, didn’t blink when I spent whole days lying on my stomach examining the intricacies of lichen, and loaned me her canoe so my best friend and I could explore the coast. This past