It’s been snowing steadily now for hours. Billions upon billions of unique crystalline flakes falling from…where? It’s such a profound mystery how that happens! As I walked this morning with Ubuntu I stopped frequently to really experience the snow falling, and the unusual quality of silence that snow always seems to bring with it. I was amazed how I could walk through it without really noticing it, but when I stopped, there was so much astonishment in what was actually happening all around me. I think of John Muir and his practice of going out in vibrant storms to really experience them . . . often climbing trees in wild winds or heavy snow to be more fully with the weather’s miraculous energies. I stopped this morning to remember the wonder available to us always…offered freely by Nature in all Her forms….in exuberant weather, in the diversity and intricacy of plants, in the grace and movement of bodies, in the soulful eyes of the wild ones…in the landscape’s unending forms. Sadly, I’m aware of how often wonder can be forgotten or go unnoticed. It’s not that it isn’t there, but somehow, strangely, we all too often simply don't stop to receive it. Life on Earth is nothing short of a miracle…all on it’s own…being who it is. And yet in the last 300 years we humans have gotten on a train of production with the advent of the Industrial Growth Movement that has derailed some of us from the magic and wonder of what surrounds us so generously and abundantly.
We have averted our eyes to watch screens and re-enactments of nature instead of being with Her and attending those wonders in our sensual effectual embodied ways. It is in this missing of the world around us that we are damaging and destroying the natural systems that give us life and in so doing, in the severance of our connection there, we are wounding ourselves…perhaps mortally. Without our hearts hung securely on the beauty and wonder offered, we are capable of unspeakable and thoughtless acts of cruelty and abuse. The wounds are not only on visible physical world realities, but in layers upon layers of spiritual consciousness unseen but instrumental in life’s stupendous makeup.
Wonder and contemplation are related.
Without both as a steady diet we cannot transform the world adequately.
Take a moment today…to pause for wonder and contemplate the world and all the Love we have been given.
You will find it…it surrounds us.
and not along enough
to make every moment holy” ~Rilke