Open to the wonder of it all

Wonderment aflame. katariinajarvinen/Flickr/C BY-NC-ND 2.0
"I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering about the big things and asking about the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love."

― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

My baby doesn't kick; it stretches. For months now, its semicircular position has helped it push its little foot into the flexible walls of my belly so that a heel-hard lump pokes out from beneath my right rib cage. A knob of wonder, I think every time. A reminder that an autonomous person is building bit by bit inside me, and that it too wants to test its constraints, explore its existence, and discover what lies beyond known borders.

These days, with gestation rapidly waning and actual parenthood waxing, I'm forced to consider whether 40 weeks of growing a human being has normalized the miraculous and made it mundane. I feel more fixated on labor stages and breathing techniques and birth partner support than I do on the mutability of life as I have known it to this point. Yet when that insistent heel chimes in like a game show buzzer, it recalls me (despite myself) to the present moment.

My priority for the last week or two of this sacred period, then, is not to freeze meals or stock extra diapers. It is to ask myself on repeat: Do I choose and invite the joy that longs to fill me? Have I left room for rampant delight to trample illusory control? In short, am I remaining open to the wonder of it all -- the beauty, the discovery, the pain, the enchantment, the enormity and impossibility of life itself?

A knob of wonder turned to 11, incapable of being any less.


Prayer #328: The Beginning of Wisdom

Socrates said, "Wonder is the beginning of wisdom," but I wonder if my brand of wondering -- my meandering awe, my distracted musings, my inconsistent revelations -- will bear the vaunted fruit in enough time for it to be any use to me.

Though, he did say the beginning of wisdom. Not the final stage to reach, nor the ultimate goal to attain. It's more like wonder is the patch of sunlight that beckons me outdoors, the curious object that begs my close examination, the low murmur that draws me closer for a listen. It starts my journey, then accompanies me, along the way honing my perceptions and augmenting my experiences.

And it will, if I allow it, open me to You.

Amen.