Feeling Wonder-Full

For some reason, when I woke this morning, I reached for last year's weekly calendar and thumbed through late July and early August, reading the two- or three-sentence reflections I'd written in each day's space.  As I read, what struck me wasn't the emergence of a cancer storyline so much as the steady presence of wonder.

Mixed in with all the MRIs, prognoses and appointments were lots of wonderful moments, marked in blue ink: "Just a beautiful, beautiful day. . . lovely day. . . a nice a.m. thunderstorm. . . beautiful sky. . .  great walk. . . a very nice first day back at school. . . cuddled with mom. . . Holmes Lake. . . Jamaica Trail. . . Branched Oak. . . laid on the patio and looked at the sky. . . enjoyed seeing neighbors on this beautiful day. . . the chrysalis became a monarch!"

I don't know why wonder is my steady companion but I welcome its company.

. . . which is why I welcomed everyone's eclipse stories this week.  Usually, wonder is a solitary experience, a moment of heightened awareness in which we are hugged by our surroundings.  That millions of us got hugged Monday afternoon felt like a tremendous gift and I couldn't get enough of it.  I'm not prone to tears, but I found myself welling up as I perused people's post-ecliptic Facebook musings.  Over and over, I read or listened to others' words of wonder and enjoyed a vicarious jolt of joy.

Boy, did we need a little wonder this week, eh?

And yet, witnessing the eclipse with my childhood friends--while truly awesome--was only one moment of wonder for me this week.  Thumbing through this year's calendar notes, I was reminded that I'd shimmered at least three times in the past week.

A few evenings ago, standing in a field of shoulder-high grasses--my fingers still sticky from ice cream--I happened upon a praying mantis as big as my hand.  I stared in awe while Allison and Mark backtracked to admire this beautiful creature with me. On our short drive back from East Campus, I had the strange sensation of my limbs floating above everything.

Again, Sunday morning, after a most violent night of storms, wonder found me, this time in Quinn Chapel, a small, mostly-black church on 9th Street.  Our church's women's board was spending the morning at Quinn, both at worship and at a lunch to follow.  There in the third pew,  Rev. Karla Cooper's words washed over me, painted in vibrant, staccatoed tones, and I was aglow.  The meal that followed was a gift, too.

I am so hungry to find a way through these times, to build bridges, to peel back the privilege of my own skin and rest under the cool shade of a tree with odd bedfellows.  The eclipse reminded me that, every so often, we get to do just that--to share wonder on a grand scale.  But the rest of my week? That's where I find the most hope--in those small moments of daily wonder when my eyes are opened and my heart lets in a little something that shifts me.