Resting our hearts …

… in wonder

only pure experience
tender with the sharp
discomfort of time
can open the aperture
of the possible
wide enough
to bathe in astonishment

Are the routines that get us through the day serving a purpose for us? Perhaps, instead of moving us, one task, one regular practice at a time, through our lives, they are simply filling the hours, getting things done and helping us tick off those frustratingly incessant boxes on the calendar. Day after day after day. As each little box becomes something of the past, have we lived through a day that was filled with wonders we didn’t notice, possibilities we were too focused elsewhere to explore? If that’s what’s happening, why are we not noticing? Not looking for the exquisite, the extraordinary, the magical? Why are we not resting our hearts in that at least once each day? Perhaps, even, a few times a day?

Timely reminders. Photo: Gretta Vosper

The morning is moving on but I’m still working my way through the routines, the stuff I’ve set up to be done every day. It sort of works for me, scattered as my brain is, to keep a few solid markers and acknowledge when I pass them: general grooming and dressed; bed made; apple cider and cayenne swallowed; supplements; if it’s still a disaster, tidy up kitchen from night before; update on the other disasters rampant in the human experiment, a.k.a reading the news….

Ah! There it is. My stumbling block to a good day. Reading the news. Not because it is all bad, but because if I start with the news, hours slip by. Hours of hours.¹ And it isn’t even the news that I need, that we need, news that is going to help us understand the world and our environment better, news that will help us engage where we need and want to in order to live better lives and leave a better future for those to come. It’s the crazy news to which we have all been glued with a renewed vigour since the world got tilted to the right, dragged there by our southern neighbour.

American Swift. John James Audubon & Maria Popova, An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Times. Photo: Gretta Vosper

What my heart needs, though, is not more news; it’s beauty. It’s wonder. It’s the magic that happens when the unexpected coalesces and makes something so amazing that your heart grows two sizes in an instant. Maybe three sizes. I long for whatever is just behind the everyday, the normal, the ordered cupboards, plumped cushions, the cutlery organizer, and the cold. I know that and so I try to set aside time, like this, to find myself in the midst of the maelstrom, too often fleetingly, but found, usually, for at least a few minutes.

Does it help or has it made me too introspective, too content to be alone, too conversational with silence and the clocks with their gentle, persistent reminder of the “discomfort of time”? And what does “too alone” even mean if that is the condition that allows me to “abandon pressure … judgment … doubt” and find beauty all around me, explore reality, with a deep intense stare, juxtapose the various parts of the world in front of me and find chance relationships that add up to wonder, life, possibility?

When I am alone in all this space, acknowledging the enveloping embrace of reality, I ground myself in all that makes me who I am when I am not alone. It invites me into my relationships with the world, and with those I love.

And it keeps me sane. Which is a good thing because that’s what the world expects: sanity. It might not be what the world always needs, but it is certainly what the world expects.

Photo: Aaron Burden, Unsplash

This morning, just before transferring this to Substack, I read Older and Wider’s Substack about a late afternoon trip to the beach. That was wonder-filled and a delightful reprieve from the banked snow outside my door. And another Substack note about school fences being hung with coats, left anonymously for children who needed them. That was beauty and wonder, gratitude and love. And my heart felt all of that. And I felt whole once more.

And that’s what we really need, isn’t it? Wholeness. Beauty. Wonder. Thank you for journeying toward it with me.

to be worthy of magic
abandon pressure and clinging
abandon judgment and doubt
do not pretend knowing
the reason or the purpose
Maria Popova
An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days²

1. Just acknowledging that reading the news trips up my whole morning inspired me to set up a process for prepping my day. Thank you for helping me get that done!!

This post is an offshoot of my A Whole Lot of Broken Substack. It’s part of a series inspired by the artistic and poetic work Maria Popova offers in An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days2. Each post includes a minimally edited version of the reflection I’ve written as a regular morning discipline in response to one of Popova’s cards.

2. Regarding the word divinations, in which I do not believe, this from Popova’s introduction to the collection: “I don’t believe in signs – I don’t believe that this immense impartial universe concerns itself with the fate of any one of us motes of stardust … But I do believe in omens. Omens are the conversation between consciousness and reality, between the self and the unconscious – a conversation in the poetic language of belief. … We make our own omens by the meaning we confer upon chance events, and it is the making of meaning that makes us human, that makes us capable of holding something as austere and total as the universe, as time, as love without breaking.” Maria Popova

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