Wonder and (Dare I say?) Love

Dear Friends and Family,

Permit me to begin this week with a warm welcome. It’s been a while since I began this way. Every week I come to this page is a welcome to you all—you who are new and you who have been here week in and week out across miles in the wilds and now in the stillness of the familiar. Welcome, All!

Today’s meditation is a culmination on wonder in anticipation of the upcoming course, Awaken Wonder, which begins next weekend. In these January weeks, we have been laying a reflective foundation for exploring the direct experience of wonder in the course. There are 5 seats remaining, and it is not too late to register.

I attach the course description at the bottom of the reflection and invite you to email me if you would like to register. (Please do so no later than tomorrow, Monday, Jan 22; reneeeliphd@gmail.com).

With all that, I leave you now with this week’s meditation.

Ever in gratitude and with love,

Renée

An Arctic dip swept in on all-day and all-night winds. I slept with wool on my feet and trunk, flannel on my legs, and a nightcap made from both. It is -3ºF/-19ºC outside. Inside the van, I see my breath. The windows behind my pillows draw crystalline blueprints inside of the world outside. I climb out of bed, put the kettle on, and re-sock my feet with thicker wool. Reaching toward the cloth that, when the water warms, will wash the night from my eyes, I hear the shuffle of my feet—a whisper of wool on wood.

With the sound comes listening to the sound and the sudden awareness that it is me listening—the awareness opening a wondering gap

and a recognition that soon slips in . . .

This shuffle is finitude. Someday this sound from these feet will no longer be; and on that same someday, the world as seen through just these eyes will no longer be.

This in-sight draws me right back to the sound and my feet I see myself seeing, and the ice on the windows, and beyond, the troupe of tree limbs giving shape to a morning, fleeting.

I once knew a boy of three whose father was in his final days of living, whose mother was taken up with the task of at once caring for and letting go of her beloved. The boy and I stood together at the edge of a bed of flowers, which was itself at the edge of a wood and only footsteps from a front doorway that, should one open it, would make palpable in one sensate flash the living process of relinquishing life.

But our attention was not there because he was three, and I was at his beck. He was quiet but not sullen, squatted as he was and transfixed, eyes softly touching every petal, clod of dirt, and bug before him. “A butterfly!” he squealed, his body leaping now toward an outstretched monarch lifting and gliding motionless into a sky so drenched in blue it was as if to be blue—every shade and quality of it in one long stare and there, a gap that opened and closed in a leap and lilt between boy and butterfly.

Just days before, his father and I stood but a foot or two shy of this same place, a week before he would take, then surrender, his final breath. On this day, he swore he saw fairies—oh not really fairies but something like fairies—there where the old craggy pine draped over a thick bed of its own shedding, and moss. He spoke, hesitant and at the same time, with urgency as if to say without saying, This should be known.

I understood and asked him to say what he saw. All around, he said, was luminous flickering. All around, he said, was pulsing aliveness. Nothing was not. The world was dancing, and so, too, was he, he said without saying it, his body still and standing, his eyes sapphire penetrating the air, his voice his and yet from elsewhere.

I found myself drifting into his words, the words like matter my body was melting into—the drift a defamiliarizing of ordinary meaning: The words we recognize as familiar to what they describe were here something altogether absent the ordinary.

A tree is a tree, but what does the word tree mean if you don’t feel in your bones the beingness of the tree when you see and say it?

It is said that love is the affinity for being¹ and wonder is the gap of excitation between human and the world.²

These two go together. Let us begin at the end and go back.

In wonder, there is the sudden sweep of bodily awareness that comes long before thought.³ This awareness is suddenly suffused with the sensate immediacy of a gap between self and world—the world at once extraordinary.⁴

You might recognize the felt sense of this gap akin to a skip between two beats of your heart.

Before, the heart was beating  

|    |    |   |   |  

and you took no note. Then came a flutter—a gap—and to you came the sensate immediacy of your heart   

|    |    |        |    |    

and you took pause, and for a moment, you wondered through the whole of your body, What was that?

Did you notice in that flutter you felt something take your breath?

Wonder will do that.

What made you take another?

You did not think to breathe. Inbreath came without thought. We could say it came by the affinity for being through the whole of your body.⁵

Something within desires to be.⁶ That something, that affinity for being, is life’s love of itself wishing you into another breath and another after that.

Is this not the stuff of wonder?

The whole universe is pulsing with this affinity for being! And we—we humans—are given to the capacity to be wowed that this is so, and at the same time, terrified by the profundity of mystery by which and through which we have our being and over which we have zero control. None. What mercy is ours to admire.

My dear friends, to admire is to wonder at the miraculous mystery of it all.⁷

Wonder and love are inseparable in the same way that self and world, being and not being, are inseparable. Wonder defamiliarizes the familiar. It re-sensitizes us toward an affinity for being. It enlivens us to life and to love. Wonder is a moment of relational sensitivity, amplifying experience with the world and so, closing the gap that—peering through a dying man’s words—is nothing more than perceptual.⁸

We need wonder.

If this is so, what of this: Someday . . . the world as seen through just these eyes will no longer be. Does the world need wonder through us?

Of you and me, when this someday comes, the world will be seen through countless other eyes that do not include your eyes and mine, and so, the world will not be the same, in the same way that it is not the same every other moment that any other life comes to an end.

The world is by how it is experienced, and that experience is an ever-unfolding flux. In this very moment of that ceaseless unfolding, you and I are the world to one another and every other being. We are the world.

What if wonder is given by and through the miraculous mysterious affinity for being so that we may see . . . and be seen?

(We are not referring here to ordinary seeing. We are referring to seeing from the whole of being the way a young child sees.)

Is seeing not affinity for being? Meaning, if in a moment, seeing awakens in wonder, is this sudden burst of admiration not love moving through us?

Wonder and love, we see, are inseparable.

---

---

1. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (London: William Collins Sons & Co, 1965).

2. Howard L. Parsons. “A Philosophy of Wonder,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Sep, 1969), pp.84–101. https://doi.org/10.2307/2105923 (Passage modified slightly for gender inclusivity.)

3. Ibid. See also Jeff Malpas, “Beginning in Wonder: Placing the Origin in Thinking,” in ed. Nikolas Kimpridis, Philosophical Romanticism (New York: Routledge, 2006); Aristotle penned these ideas in Metaphysics, 982b11–12, and Plato in Theaetetus, 155c-d, and so, too, Lao Tzu in Tao Te Ching. It could be said that wonder is recognized, even wondered about, in the Axial Age (dates vary: ~800–200BCE), as the human moves out of the primacy and immediacy of wonder into the primacy of discursive thought—an epochal leap in the unfolding of the expression of consciousness through the human (per Jean Gebser, Ever-Present Origin, and Teilhard de Chardin, Phenomenon, amongst others). It could be said that the movement toward the next epoch in the human is a re-integration of wonder that, in fact, closes the gap between subject–object perception. Above, I refer to wonder as opening a gap of self-recognition in the world. This “opening a gap” is how wonder is described in most of the literature. My own sense, as I touch on above, is that it goes both ways. Wonder bridges a chiasm, which is to say, a gap that looks both ways—opening awareness of self in the world and closing the perceptual gap between self and world as subject and object. Maurice Merleau-Ponty names this chiastic gap, flesh, in the post-humous, The Visible and Invisble, trans. Alphonso Lingis, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1968); see also fn 5 below.

4. Malpas, “Beginning in Wonder.”

5. This reflection opens myriad questions about dying. When dying comes, breathing comes to an end, we know, but does dying portend the end of affinity for being, the end of love? Or is it so that when the gap between being and not being, self and world, is closed, all that is is love? Wonder, it could be said, closes the gap in such a way that love may be in a world where subject–object perception is primary.

6. de Chardin, Phenomenon.

7. Miracle and admire come from the same Latin root, mira. Miracle comes from miraculum—object of wonder; admire derives from mirari—to wonder.

8. The ideas of defamiliarization, resensitization, relational sensitivity, and amplification are borrowed from Cathering Keller in the opening of her book, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003). Keller does not explore wonder explicitly in this opening; she discloses an inner orientation necessary to come to the reading of “In the beginning” anew.