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Lie on your back somewhere other than your bed. Outside, under a tree would be great, but any place will do. The middle of your kitchen, for example, or a busy sidewalk in your town’s urban core. Stay a while. Look. Notice, if you’re under a tree, how it is like a giant, branches outstretched like arms, holding up the sky. What else do you see?

Let it happen. Sometimes, the most awe-inspiring moments are those that creep up when we’re quiet and listening. A fellow naturalist and I used to take turns leading night walks in a national park in eastern Canada. We would be out for hours, without flashlights, guiding our visitors along the trail, through the forest, through their fears, feeling our way by the sound of our feet on the paths. At one point, we’d sit down along the trail, close our eyes, and just listen, quiet the body, and attempt, albeit falteringly, to quiet the mind. We invariably had extraordinary experiences—a coyote howling a hundred feet away; a family of mice scampering through our midst, so certain of our belonging in that forest with them that for once, faced with twenty humans, they felt no fear. My colleague returned from his walk once flushed with excitement: a majestic moose had walked right through the middle of his group as they had been sitting, open to experience.

Get uncomfortable. Even those of us in the “biz” sometimes lose our senses of wonder. Months of answering persistent “what is it?” questions can erode even the most genuine wonderer. So, when the world presses in with its schedules and plans and anxieties, I do something a bit yucky—let a slug from my garden crawl up my arm, or lie down outside in a terrible rainstorm. It always works. Once I get over the instant “you’re going to get dirty/catch a flu/be slime” reaction, I begin to feel amazed. When you’ve been pummeled by rain for half an hour, or have slug trails drying sticky on your skin it is hard not to feel at least a kernel of awe.

Stay up all night, outside. Maybe it’s a meteor shower in August, or spotlights glancing off a skyscraper, or the sound of spring peepers in a nearby pond. Whatever you find in the places near you, night will give you an entirely different view of your world. Remember that a missed night of sleep is only that, whereas a moment of true wonder will last the rest of your life.

Go Alone. Whenever you can, go alone. Find a way to get alone for ten minutes every day. Walk. Wander. If you can clear your mind and let the outside in, wonder will find you.

The easiest route into wonder is to shift your perspective. We have all experienced those blinding moments of clarity when adrift in a new city, in an airplane looking at the patterns below, or on a boat gazing back at the land. And we can experience those moments here, now, in our daily lives, by cultivating a habit of attention. It is the lesson of the ecologist, the photographer, the poet: Look. Look again. Wonder.

Munju Ravindra is a naturalist, storyteller, gardener, planner, ecologist, designer, explorer, wonderer, and observer of beauty. After many years of working in national parks, she now works as a consultant who helps parks, museums, and businesses create opportunities for “transformative experience.” More information about Munju and her work can be found at www.ideasunlimited.ca.

Embodying Change

CHERYL PALLANT

Between 1998 and 2003, I made several trips to Malaysia to teach. When not teaching, my sights were set on taking a train to the Taman Nagara National Park. Covering more than 1,600 square miles in Peninsular Malaysia, this area is home to 10,000 plant species, at least 250 bird species, wild ox, tapir, elephant, leopards, tigers, numerous monkey species, and the hairy rhino. The park provides guest hideaways that are semi-camouflaged wood perches in the trees for observing the life abounding in the underbrush and among the branches.

The hairy rhino caught my attention because this shy, solitary, plant-eating mammal teeters on the brink of extinction. This rhino, the smallest