Of Wound and Wonder
Dancing the Domain of Suffering with Intention
Dear Friends,
There is much in today’s letter before I turn you over to the essay.
On Tuesday, I will board a plane for Portugal to visit one son who moved there while I was in the far reaches of Alaska on pilgrimage in 2022–23. He and I will do a walking pilgrimage. I cannot anticipate what you’ll receive from me over the next few weeks. And while it is true that I am over the moon to see my son for the first time since I left for my journey in 2022, it is also true that I will be walking each mile in the true spirit of pilgrimage. I go forth! on behalf of all of us and this aching world.
After today’s essay, please be sure to keep reading. There’s a Save the Date! announcing our next pilgrimage retreat in New Mexico, in the High Desert Mountains north of Santa Fe, May 20–26.
Today’s short essay is guided by a few comments after last week’s essay on intentional suffering. Typically, I am disinclined to offer words that hint at practice in these essays, but I felt compelled to tip-toe in that direction toward the end. My hope is to give you a place to begin—those of you drawn to explore intentional suffering, as many of you seem to be, per comments and correspondences. Please go gently, dear friends. We are resuscitating extravagant tenderness, beginning with self.
As always, and never said often enough, how sweetly humbling it is knowing we meet on this page every week. Thank you.
With love,
Renée
Day by day it’s like this. I sit before the sun soon to breach the horizon behind the trees naked with winter. I wait for the first rays still warm from the belly of night to wound my eyes with the nuance of innocence and the still silence of morning to suffer the first murmur of sound, the ache that whispers the birds awake. I have no will before what unfolds before me. It has not always been this way. Pain and sorrow gave back this life fresh as a child sees it.
When perchance the world imposes itself upon the clamor of thought, and the heart starts to quiver just so, we can be sure we have been wounded. In the truest sense, a wound is a breach in the membrane of awareness. It is a sudden opening in the established and expected meaning of things. In the truest sense, a wound is a doorway to wonder.
These two, wound and wonder, travel the long highway of meaning back to one word, to the German, Wunde. Wunde shakes us from our waking slumber. It breaches the unessential urgencies ceaselessly imposing upon our life—the worry, the rush, the over-commitments, the tired reach for security—and stirs us with unwavering immediacy to that which is essential but rarely imposes itself upon us. This is wunde, the wound of wonder.
It comes unbidden. It comes unbidden as if it seeks us, finds us, calls our name. And in its bidding, it accesses the heart and nourishes us with an energy to sustain intimacy with the world. The thing about wonder is that it folds in on itself as it folds back onto the world, the inner inside is the open and vulnerable childlike heart.
Wonder begins in the world and by some lumined grace in the infinite field of presence, wonder reaches us. In a moment, it chooses us, as when the sky ablaze with the sun spilling its last rays into the not-yet night swallows whole the breath before we can take it. What avails us to this grace of being so struck is a vulnerable heart found open.
Wonder may be a thruway to suffering with intention. But we must wander this possibility with great care lest we bring along the clamor of thought. Wonder is not curiosity! Wonder strikes the heart and when it turns back to the world from whence it came, it does so with the intimacy of inner feeling fresh as a child feels it. In this way, wonder moves us to meet the world with naked intent, innocent and soft. And in such a state, we cannot help but suffer wunde.
Bearing pain and sorrow and being struck with wonder both breach the membrane of ordinary awareness and seize us from the taken-for-granted. The aches of being a body—absent acute injury requiring medical care—offer a first ring of practice for meeting suffering with the open and vulnerable childlike heart of enfolded wonder. In everyday aches, the body refuses the intrinsic desire to move through life with ease. Every refusal is an invitation to soften from the subtle depths of the inner within, not to rid the ache, though that would be nice, but to lend the hand of tenderness to what hurts.
Wonder a little closer as you can bear it, knowing always that you can retreat. Wondering a little closer is coming toward the discomfort with naked intent. This, too, you could not see until the door opened, and you, lost in thought, lost the thought and came to your body that willed you to it. And to this will, you came fresh as a child, breaching the fortress of memory, absenting the learned worry, being touched as with a kiss from a breeze that dare not rustle the leaves.
You were dancing the domain of suffering. You were doing so with intention. From aches and discomfort, you soon wondered pain more painful to bear. You wondered disappointment, frustration, exhaustion, a broken heart, and beyond these, the rings of suffering rippling out across the sea of sorrows of the world. And to this, you were greeted one by one with beams of energy, you now a mother birthing the world on a ray of eternal tenderness.
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Save the Date!
“The Pathless Path: Walking the Way of the Pilgrim in a Time between Worlds” An In-Person Gathering May 20–26. Pecos Benedictine Monastery. Pecos, New Mexico. email Doreen Tanenbaum to save your spot: tanenbaumd [AT] gmail
Since ancient times, seekers have set out on pilgrimage as a way toward self-realization. The inner journey is a pathless path, lived in and through the body in communion with the earth. Animated by an inborn quest, the pilgrim is called to go forth! toward the depths of being, leaving behind the worldly familiar and following the whispers of the presence within to guide the way.
A profound shift seems to be cocooning in the imaginal cells of the collective human psyche. In this time between worlds, we are called to the wild depths of soul. The way of the pilgrim invites us to belong to these times, our world, and the living earth, and supports us through the great work of the unfolding of humanity as an ecological and evolutionary imperative.
During this six-day silent gathering, we will invoke pilgrimage (in place) on sacred ground in the high desert mountains of New Mexico, wandering the pathless path on Earth walks, in meditation/prayer of the heart, daily reflections and practices that enliven presence and affective intimacy with one another and the world, quiet periods of gestational rest, and reflective conversation at day’s end.
Renee, ready to comment on wonder/wound and the open heart, then I come across Veronika’s comment above. I am stunned with wonder in this moment. Just yesterday I discovered her work and became introduced to her chapters on Synchronosophy. It was as if I have a framework to hold my journey through grief these last years. So many synchronicities that led me to mystery and meaning, that became a conduit to reinterpreting my whole life including my relationship with my beloved since her passing. And here, another synchrony— from you to Veronika to ‘the Way’ (whom I ventured remotely with my Spanish Co-angel not to long ago). Veronika noted that “synchrony is everywhere”. It can only be that the vulnerable, the broken open heart, is by nature the perceptive organ that seeds wonder inside us. These seeds germinate meaning into the many dark and tangled plots of our life. In THIS moment I am astonished how solid the ground feels beneath my feet, my legs, my heart.
So lovely Renée. Your wisdom never only enters my mind, but like a million-tentacled creature, reaches into my viscera, mirroring its capacity to hold and harmonize seemingly opposing energies.
“Bearing pain and sorrow and being struck with wonder both breach the membrane of ordinary awareness and seize us from the taken-for-granted.”
Maybe you’re aware of the poet Maya C Popa? Her latest collection is titled Wound is the Origin of Wonder. 🙏