Wonder

“The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour.
Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.”
– John Burroughs

What you need: a 20-30 minute space in which to creatively respond, paper and art supplies, a candle, music, fellowship should you choose to gather, light the flame, and wonder collectively

“Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak . . . surrender to them.
Don’t ask first whether it’s permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god.
You will ruin yourself if you do that. ”
– Hermann Hesse

What sparks wonderment within you, moves awe right now? How do you keep with a sense of vitality flowering on your flights through habitats cold and blue?

 “Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.”
– John Muir

Read through the quotes and poems and feel into what they evoke, who and how and what you’re winging toward, away from, into, with or without on your wanderings and wonderings at this moment.

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.”
– Byron

Write your own poem, invocation, or paint, sketch, doodle, or color a depiction . . . you could combine them or do none at all, just be with what’s evocative.

“If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”
– Rachel Carson

Below is my found poem.  What is a found poem you may be wondering?  Akin to collage, rather than torn imagery reused in new ways, it is a page from a book, magazine, a written work, where you scan through the writing and black out text, cutting away words, and a poem is ‘found’ in what’s leftover, give it a try!

deep shades overhead.

one side of the canyon opens,
an amazing spectacle,
approaching flocks of birds
flash across cliffs
disappearing
into the waiting blue.

marvel at the way
Macaw loosens
rocks with saliva.

as darkness falls
dancing downward
broad shadows fly,
flocks settle in roosts;
nest holes dug in canyon cliffs
habitat thriving

“Human beings make life so interesting. Do you know, that in a universe so full of wonders, they have managed to invent boredom.”
-Terry Pratchett