I've been thinking a lot about wonder and awe lately.
Wonder is a funny word. It has three different meanings: 'to feel surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable', 'to desire knowledge or be curious', and 'to doubt'.
We're in what feels like a particularly heavy time in the world, as well as what has been an extremely challenging one for me personally. Cultivating a sense of wonder is what has kept me sane, and even happy, amidst all of these woes, near and far. For me, wonder is a sense of magic, a moment of pause. It's something that makes me laugh, or cry, or feel. It's a moment that stops me in my tracks, or makes me think, or fills me with a sense that something beautiful has been created. It's art or nature or people. It’s unexpected, or magical, or spiritual. It's momentous or a mere trifle.
Wonder is very personal. The things that bring me joy and a sense of magic aren't going to be the things that bring you joy. But I hope that by sharing my dashes of wonder, it will remind you to find yours too. I've found that taking a few moments of pause and reflection, and cultivating that sense of wonder gives me some much-needed fuel for my fire and balm for my soul. I hope they'll help you find what you need, too.
My goal is to share my dashes of wonder once a week, perhaps more. Sometimes they'll be things I have seen, heard, or read. Sometimes they'll be things I've consumed (or want to consume). Perhaps I'll share what brings other people wonder, too.
So, here are my dashes of wonder for the week:
An Essay
The essay "These Precious Days", by Ann Patchett is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I've ever read. Briefly, it's about a relationship that develops between Ann Patchett and Sooki, who happens to be Tom Hanks' assistant. It's about friendship and illness and hope and creativity. It will make you cry. It's beautiful and personal. It's desperately sad yet beautifully life-affirming at the same time. It reminded me that there can be wonder and joy in sadness. It's a pandemic story, too, and captures that weird, scary blip in time.
This essay came to me because my book club read "Tom Lake". I'd resisted this book mightily because it seemed overhyped. Friends, the hype is real. I loved it. It's light and happy and serious and beautifully readable: a great read for a summer vacation.
Jolene
If you know me personally, you know that I know absolutely nothing about music. I enjoy listening to music, kinda, but it's never been a huge part of my life. Growing up, I just wasn't that into music and I'm still not. My husband (a former Rolling Stone journalist and once passionate teenage maker of mixed tapes) thinks this is a deeply weird trait. How can one go through life not knowing who Elliott Smith is? To me, music hasn’t been the art form that moved me or that I connected with - I don’t really know why. Luckily, you are not here for my avant-garde music recommendations. So, I'll just share with you my low-brow listen of the week, and that's Beyoncé’s version of Dolly Parton's Jolene. I freaking love it. Listen to it and read the lyrics: in Dolly's version, she's begging Jolene not to steal her man. Jolene has all the power. In Beyoncé’s version, she's the queen, and Jolene is just one of a thousand pretty girls. Dolly's Jolene is a powerful song: Beyonce's Jolene is a song from and about a woman in control.
The Middle of the Night
I know that many of my midlife (yuck, there has got to be a better word than that) friends wake up in the middle of the night. I do, too. It's been a cause of massive stress for me. That time, the witching hour, is when the problems of the day become massive, scary, insurmountable ogres. The loss of sleep itself is also stressful,'Shit! I'm going to be so tired tomorrow! I need to sleep! I can't get back to sleep! I need eight hours and now I'll only have six! five!'
But recently, I've been cultivating a different relationship with those hours. I read somewhere that before the industrial revolution and artificial light there was a concept of 'two sleeps'. The first from around 9 pm - midnight or so, and then from 1.30 or so until dawn. The break in the middle could be a time of work, contemplation, prayer, or dream analysis (if you're interested, you can read more here.)
Perhaps driven by understanding that this wakeup time is pretty natural (and also, is very hormonal….which is a story for another day), I've started to recalibrate my relationship with it. I actually now sometimes even feel a sense of excitement: the joy of unstructured time! No-one bothering me! I’ve come to think that in that liminal wakeup time, we're closer to a dreamlike state, and perhaps we're more creative or inspired, and I’m leaning into that.
I might listen to a meditation or yoga nidra track on my Insight Timer meditation app. Because it's the witching hour, and everything is a bit dreamy and fuzzy, I feel justified in getting a bit witchy. This is a bit of a leap from my rationale, all business daytime persona…but I’m trying it on. For me, that means asking my spirits for advice, it means asking for guidance, peering into the unknown…just going where the thoughts take me.
Sometimes I'm awake at the time when it goes from dark to light and from silence to the merry racket of the dawn chorus. I recently downloaded a birding app, Picture Bird (free, because I'm all about free these days) that identifies birdsong. There's a window behind my bed and we're in that lovely time of the year when we can sleep with it open. We have cardinals and jays and sparrows and wrens and the charmingly named Northern Flicker, Eastern Towhee, and Nashville Warbler. A few days ago, my app told me that one of the birds was a Great Horned Owl. I was pretty tickled. Who knew that we had Great Horned Owls in Montclair, New Jersey? Then I realized that maybe the app was just picking up my husband's snoring. And that made me happy too.
Have a great week. May you find some wonder as you go about your days.
xx Kate
P.S.: This is my first newsletter. Let me know what you think in the comments below, and share where you found some wonder.
Love the idea of calling forth the spirits during the witching hour! Also, of course it's the time of life for a bird identifier. More please!
Loved this! Look forward to more of your musings…