High on Happiness

Posts Tagged ‘wonder’

A squiggle of purple flowers on the cart caught my eye.  Maybe it was the intensity of the color, or the energetic waves of the petals, I don’t know.  But all of a sudden I felt as if I were seeing the world through the eyes of Vincent Van Gogh.  It all seemed so passionate and alive.

“How many ways can you paint a flower?” I wondered.  “Or an insect, or a bird, or a baby, or a tree?”    Think of the countless variety of colors, of shapes and sizes even one species comes in.  This is no cookie-cutter world we live in.  It’s a veritable banquet of sensual delights.

Think of all the colors the human eye can see, the range of sounds our ears can hear, the vast array of textures and pressures we perceive, the fragrances, the tastes.  The countless variations astound the mind.  And still, what we sense is only one small slice of what’s there.  Whole worlds dance outside our senses’ capacity to perceive them.

I read once that when we pass onto the next dimension, we acquire additional senses and so perceive an even more complex and intricate world.  And as we move through eternity, we gradually acquire greater and greater capacities to experience the magnificence of it all.  Then, after billions and billions of years and a sojourn that wends its way through universe after universe, we’re finally large enough and strong and pure enough to see it all, and to see that it’s always new, always changing and never ever ends.  And so we erupt into songs of  joy that flow endlessly through all creation.

When I saw the tiny maple leaves, just emerged from the tip of the branch, I thought about watching one of those time lapse movies.  You know, the ones where you see a whole day sweep by from sunset to dusk in a mere minute or two.

I imagined a little maple seed, the kind that twirl to the ground like helicopters, settling into the soil, sprouting, enduring a winter, coming back taller and stronger each spring until today, it stood before me, a proud sapling, with its endless unfolding of new leaves.  Soon it would produce helicopter seeds of its own, and the story would go on and on.

It reminded me of an exercise I learned once where you travel back through the history of something to appreciate all that contributed to its presence in your life.  If you were eating an apple, for instance, you could trace it back to the store where you bought it and think about all the people who were involved in operating the store.  Someone ordered it; someone sold it; someone unpacked it from its crate and set it out for display.

Before that, it traveled on a truck that came from a distributor who bought it from an orchard.  The truck had a driver, who worked for a company, and it traveled over roads that were imagined and engineered and built.

The apple was one of dozens that came from a tree that thrived in the orchard, soaking in a summer’s sun and rain.  And before that it was a blossom that grew on a tree that produced a seed.  Someone bought the seedling it produced and placed it in the soil and nurtured it. Someone picked it and placed it in the crate that was loaded onto the truck.

And now it was in your hand, and you would bite it and think what a miracle it was and how crisp and juicy and sweet its flesh.  And it would nurture you.  You were the whole reason it came to be.  You and the owner and workers in the orchard, and in the grocery store and the builders of crates and trucks.  And the story goes on and on.

It’s a wonderful exercise.  It gives you a unique perspective.  It broadens your sense of the connectedness of things and leads you to appreciate the wonder of life’s endless unfolding.  And in the end, it leads you to the big questions:  How did it all come to be?  Where did it come from?  Why am I, a tiny life form on a small speck of planet in the midst of a giant and dazzling universe, capable of wondering why?

The variety of life forms, their shapes and functions and interrelatedness;  the harmony, the artistry, the mystery of it all:  Sometimes it simply astounds me.  . .

For 300 days now, I have been collecting photographic examples of the One Song Singing.  The name comes from “Uni,” meaning one, and “Verse,” a poem, a melody, a song.  And I realize anew that no one mind can ever grasp the depth of its infinity.  It takes all of our eyes, all of our experiences, throughout all of time for us to even begin to know its infinite ways and wonders.

I am looking only at the way it shows itself in the landscape and vegetation within a few miles of my home.  Beyond, countless worlds exist, an endless panoply of beauty.  And what lies within us is more astounding still.

Here we are, arrogant little bags of protoplasm, sailing through an incomprehensible vastness on a tiny speck of dirt.  And think of this:  we know that’s what we are, and we know that we are somehow something far more, too, and inseparable from the Grand Mystery that generates and upholds it all.

And we do not know its name or whether we will ever see it face to face.  But we know that we live, and laugh, and love within its embrace.  And that is the ultimate key to its nature, and to our joy.

“We need a renaissance of wonder.  We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is a miracle and magic.” ~E. Merrill Root

Wonder is gratitude’s cousin, a welling up of awe at the glorious mystery of it all.  It comes from somewhere beyond thought, lifting the veil of naming so that we see can what is before us directly and be amazed.  It opens up our child-eyes and reveals a world that’s fresh and unexplained.

Wonder is filled with the isness of things in all their pristine beauty.  It shows us their sparkle and depth, their harmony and connection, the way that everything dances together in one grand, majestic song.

It piques our appetite for life.  It teases our curiosity.  It shows us how little we know, how much remains to be discovered.  And so we probe the grand design of the world, with its atoms and quarks, its cells and spinning galaxies.  And we are stunned by it and surprised and filled with admiration.

“From wonder into wonder, existence opens,” said LaoTzu.  At every turn, there is more to see and all of it is a marvel, and none more than we who look upon it.  We, who are blessed with consciousness and perception; we, who can feel ecstasy and love; we are blessed just to be.

As this holiday season of joy and celebration descends upon us, open your heart to the wonder of it all.  Let your soul sing its song, and your mind open to its beauty and reclaim the sense that life is indeed miracle and magic.

Every now and then, synchronicities happen that tell you you’re on the right path.  Since I began my search for daily answers to the question, “Why am I so happy now?” they seem to pop up with increasing frequency.  But few are as blatant or wonderful as the one that happened yesterday.

After work, I was driving down a country road looking for the photo-of-the-day for my Flickr project.  I was in a wonderful frame of mind – relaxed, happy, glad to be alive.

All day I had been enjoying the panorama of playful clouds outside my window and I was looking forward to finding a good cloud shot for my photo for the day.  I opted to drive down a country road and got a couple decent photos, but an insistent feeling kept telling me that I needed just one more.

I kept my eyes opened for possibilities as I drove toward home.  Finally I spotted a place I where I could pull off the road a bit.  I parked and saw the roadside trees were hiding a cornfield lined with woods.  It would make a fine foreground for the heaps of clouds I wanted to capture.  I walked through the brush back to the corn and started shooting, loving the fragrance of the ripening corn, the beautiful blue of the sky.

I had just finished a couple shots when I noticed the sound of a propeller plane directly overhead.  And when I looked up, I could hardly believe what I was seeing.  Right, there, directly above my head, the pilot was making a drawing in the sky. Why, I hadn’t seen sky writing since I was a kid!

The little airplane was just finishing off a giant oval when I looked up.  And then, to my complete delight and amazement, he painted a smile and lines for eyes.  “Oh my gosh!  It’s a smiley face!” I gasped out loud, struck with wonder that this symbol of happiness was floating right above me.

As soon as I recovered from astonishment, I grabbed the shot—and less than a minute later, the winds had blown the drawing away and the plane was gone.

Had I not been in exactly that spot, at exactly that moment, I would have missed it.  But obviously, I was meant to be there.   This one was a present just for me.  And I embraced it with wonder and joy.