Gratitude and Wonder
“i thank you God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky.”
It’s with this ee Cummings passage that the editors of Orion magazine introduce its current issue, observing that here is a pure statement of gratefulness for the natural world. How appropriate that I have read it on the eve of Thanksgiving, a reminder that my gratitudes need to extend to this planet, home to us all and to which we’re each inextricably linked.
Too often, or so it seems to me, the natural world beyond our yards, our routes to work, the trails where our customary hikes take us, the water where we paddle and swim, hook and haul, only pops into our awareness when disaster strikes. When the results of hurricane, quake or flood flash onto our TV screens. Or when we learn of another degradation wrought by the newest spill or meltdown, one more environmental mishap that’s the bad-news evidence of alarming climatic trends, short-sighted policies or the insidious profit-above-all lack of oversight. And yes, sheer thoughtlessness, the utter lack of regard when letting toxins leach into an aquifer or, from an open car window, flipping a lit cigarette butt into a dry forest.
And if not truly thoughtlessness in that sense, what about the lack of thought? Meaning not just the quick, customary glance but the casual disregard in which we do not give our amazing planet, this threatened world, its proper due. What, along with mindful stewardship is a mega dose of wonder and amazement. Clearly our earth deserves it, this planet that as I sit at my desk is whirling on its axis, hurtling along its circular orbit at such a terrifying speed it’s almost surprising I’m not flung from my chair. A two-million-year-old journey in which the North American and European continents continue to slip closer across the sea like bobbing dumplings in an immense vat of wondrous soup.
Consider wonder and I can’t help but think of children. Like my granddaughter who, at four, paused while coloring one stormy afternoon to observe, “Ooh, the wind is so mad.” Or my young nephew who, during a summer visit to the island, stumbled into our kitchen early one morning and announced, “The sky woke up.” How simple it seems for them, the way they experience the world. The way, too, for a time, babies in their young animal bodies physicaly interact with their new mysterious home. Down on all fours, similar to how a dog reads the world with its nose, a wordless baby learns via sight and sound and the short route of grasping fingers to open mouth. It's a geography shared with puppies and birds and trees, with sunlight prisming through branches where wind blows or birds perch or where, warmly pooling on the floor, a crawling child parks her bum. A world that is home to a wind that gets mad or to a sun that blinks itself awake.
Later, of course, the rhythmic sounds pouring down on a baby like rain are transformed into words. The purely sensate body becomes the speaking self, a blessed-with-consciousness being in which perception follows, as do feelings, cause-and-effect. And wonder. And awe. But how soon, I wonder, is that lost?
When does awe get translated into a flip response, a go-to noun or adjective that with repetitive, inattentive use loses any ability to differentiate, truly signify? And even before getting there, doesn’t awesome – “Awesome!” – become too easily conjoined with explosive chase scenes and other noisy mayhem on monitors and screens? But, as I've discovered with my grandchildren, I do have a small chance to muffle all that, if only for a time. During an island’s summer visit, say, on a night’s flash-lit, whispery walk to the shore where bright bits of phosphorescence – “like stars!” – emerge in still water stirred with a stick. Or on a sloshing wade out to some rosy, corraline-spackled boulders when the hush in peeling back bladder wrack reveals a large slow-groping sea cucumber or a sea star that without so much as a peep engulfs a sea urchin with its spiny arms. Or on a warm August night, when spread on a blanket beneath a sky with its promised Perseid meteor shower and the first brief, bright arc of a meteor’s transit, and a short time later, another, tell us what it’s hard to believe – that we’re watching the dazzling burn-out of stone and grit, of cometary particles streaking 150,000 miles per hour toward Earth and, heated by friction upon entering our atmosphere, sizzle and vaporize, become cosmic dust, one-thousand-year-old traces of which can be found in Arctic and Antartic ice. And consider the tides, their endless and reliable repeatings that dissolve again and again the boundaries between disparate elements, the result of a lunar cycle’s push and tug but nevertheless mysterious.
Many mornings on the island, I wake early and watch light enter the sky. From my western-facing windows, I can’t witness the sun’s actual ascent. But looking out at the water, I see its climb in the way that, after washing the sky with an initial backdrop of silver and rose, it brightens first the distant islands, plashes rocky outcroppings with a coppery sheen, gilds spruce tops and, as if they were torch-lit, sets them ablaze with color. Sometimes, in all that shimmer and gleam, a shaft of light from behind a bank of clouds erupts, illuminates with molten brilliance one particular island or stand of trees. A sudden luminosity, an unexpected – is there any other word for it? – radiance.
I’m far from the island as I write this. Through the window opposite my Illinois desk, I look out to the brick wall of our garage scripted with a tangle of now leafless Virginia creeper. Hummocking the flower bed are small collapsed mounds of dormant perennials and groundcover. Above me, snagged in one of the stripped oak branches latticing the sky, a pale plastic bag twists with the wind. A few sparrows huddle against the cold in the hawthorn by our back door. A squirrel skitters across the fence top. The sky is gray, dense and flat. Its light casts few shadows.
Here is a view that after 15 years I know intimately, this landscape of small yard and what lies beyond its fence and down the street. Were I to want something more, I could leave the comfort of my chair, my heated house, and, bundled up, walk east a few blocks to the lake front. There, if I didn’t turn my head hard to the right toward the city’s distant skyline etched against the southern horizon, my eyes would sweep unobstructed over a cold expanse of Lake Michigan. It’s different from an island-pocked watery landscape half a continent away and yet here too I’ve watched the moon, that silver-cratered beauty unspooling upon a night’s still water a shimmering, mercurial trail.
No doubt it’s easier to find awe and wonder in the beautiful and sublime, in grand expansive sweep, in what demands our notice. Like waking to a day of staggering beauty, of a molten eruption of light over a distant island, of what unique to a moment gifted me by this planet demands, “Look.”
But it’s here on a gray morning, among these adjacent houses and yards, I too must look, where, within a small and limited perspective, I must open my eyes to the seemingly mundane and quotidian, to look with wonder, seek to be awed. Failing to do so is a failure to be grateful, to recognize the thanks I owe my earthly home, the only one I know.
In my yard, the tattered plastic bag is still flagging in the oak limbs. The sparrows have yet to budge from the hawthorn but the squirrel is gone, replaced by the neighbor’s bright orange cat slinking along the fenceline. A little more light bleeding through the clotted sky has found my window. And there, tangled in the looping ivy rimming the frame, is a bird’s feather splotched with a surprising iridescence I hadn’t noticed.