Wonder
What Does the Moss Knows?
a patch of moss holds a whole forest in miniature. i kneel to look and the world stops needing anything from me. wonder asks nothing. it does not measure, does not acquire. it only receives.
~
a crystal on the windowsill. a butterfly wing, still holding its color. whitman said a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars. i believe that the way i believe the pneumatic spark is no less than the Pleroma it fell from — small, hidden, indestructible, mine.
~
wonder is not a feeling i chase. it is a state i wake into, the way sleep sometimes breaks without warning and i find myself simply here, without appetite, without agenda. i am here, that i may wonder. goethe knew what the mystics knew.
~
the world schools this out of us. childhood gives it freely; the years after spend themselves taking it back. i built rooms inside that architecture myself. i furnished them. i called it adulthood.
the Sufis have a word for the other thing: fana. the self dissolving into what it beholds. Third Step, decades in, and i am still relearning this. surrender is not a doctrine. it is moss under the knee.
~
so i go looking for moss again. for the crystal, the wing pinned to nothing, the leaf that is no less than the stars that made it. not to explain the wonder. only to stand in it — the way sophia might stand at the edge of her own forgetting, and finally, finally, recognize home.
Federico García Lorca
Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends, this is no futile path. Whether admiring a patch of moss, a crystal, flower, or golden beetle, a sky full of clouds, a sea with the serene, vast sigh of its swells, or a butterfly wing with its arrangement of crystalline ribs, contours, and the vibrant bezel of its edges, the diverse scripts and ornamentations of its markings, and the infinite, sweet, delightfully inspired transitions and shadings of its colors — whenever I experience part of nature, whether with my eyes or another of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn in, enchanted, opening myself momentarily to its existence and epiphanies, that very moment allows me to forget the avaricious, blind world of human need, and rather than thinking or issuing orders, rather than acquiring or exploiting, fighting or organizing, all I do in that moment is “wonder,” like Goethe, and not only does this wonderment establish my brotherhood with him, other poets, and sages, it also makes me a brother to those wondrous things I behold and experience as the living world: butterflies and moths, beetles, clouds, rivers and mountains, because while wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity
How to Be More Alive: Hermann Hesse on Wonder and the Proper Aim of Education
It bears repeating that what makes life livable is our ability — our willingness — to move through the world wonder-smitten by reality. The most wonderful thing about wonder is that it knows no scale, no class, no category — it can be found in a geranium or in a galaxy, in the burble of a brook or in the Goldberg Variations. “A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” wrote Walt Whitman, eternal patron saint of wonder.
Wonder, after all, is what we look for when we are looking and the richest recompense of learning how to look. G.K. Chesterton knew this when, in his wonderful meditation on the dandelion and the meaning of life, he observed that the object of the creative life, of the full life, is to dig for the “submerged sunrise of wonder.” Dylan Thomas knew it in the recognition that “children in wonder watching the stars, is the aim and the end.” Rachel Carson knew it when she insisted that the greatest gift a parent can give a child is “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 that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.” Goethe knew it when he exclaimed: “I am here, that I may wonder!”
How to live into that knowledge with the full capacity of our creaturely potential is what Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) explores in a soulful century-old reflection included in Butterflies: Reflections, Tales, and Verse (public library).
With an eye to Goethe’s immortal line, Hesse writes:
Wonder is where it starts, and though wonder is also where it ends, this is no futile path. Whether admiring a patch of moss, a crystal, flower, or golden beetle, a sky full of clouds, a sea with the serene, vast sigh of its swells, or a butterfly wing with its arrangement of crystalline ribs, contours, and the vibrant bezel of its edges, the diverse scripts and ornamentations of its markings, and the infinite, sweet, delightfully inspired transitions and shadings of its colors — whenever I experience part of nature, whether with my eyes or another of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn in, enchanted, opening myself momentarily to its existence and epiphanies, that very moment allows me to forget the avaricious, blind world of human need, and rather than thinking or issuing orders, rather than acquiring or exploiting, fighting or organizing, all I do in that moment is “wonder,” like Goethe, and not only does this wonderment establish my brotherhood with him, other poets, and sages, it also makes me a brother to those wondrous things I behold and experience as the living world: butterflies and moths, beetles, clouds, rivers and mountains, because while wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.
Art by Sophie Blackall from If You Come to Earth
But while we are born wakeful to wonder, our cultural conditioning and indoctrination — what we call our education — often schools us out of it. A century before scientists came to study the vitalizing psychology and physiology of enchantment, a century before our so-called liberal arts education had become the factory farming of the mind, Hesse laments:
Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that which they cannot teach — the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved, the Goethean sense of wonderment.
The Marginalian
Maria Popova ©
Hermann Hesse ©
Federico García Lorca ©
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