Wonder
Sweltering summer afternoons such as
these inevitably remind me of my childhood – the still air, the unrelenting
sun, and the silence only intermittently punctuated by the ratcheting sound of
a grasshopper in mid hop, or the unanswered call of a field sparrow, or the
sticking sound that automobile tires make as they accelerate down an almost
melting asphalt road.
“How about we go fossil hunting?”
I’d pose the question over the phone to my childhood friend, Charlie, or he to
me.
“What time?” was the usual response,
neither of us needing much in the way of convincing when it came to such
suggestions.
“After lunch. One o’clock. Under
the railroad trestle.”
And so we’d meet in the shade of
the old wooden bridge and ride our bicycles along the dusty trail to where the
new highway cut through the layers of a limestone undergirded hillside. Once
there, we’d make our way slowly, almost wordlessly along the fractured strata,
carefully overturning the loose rock, becoming more subtly in tune to the
mysteries of their composition as we went. At first we tended toward seeing
things that weren’t really there; so desirous, we were, of having first-hand
knowledge of that “other” world; so easily fooled, we were, by the complexity
of the Missouri limestone, embedded with concretions as it sometimes is, or
riddled through with holes made by the percolating action of groundwater. After
a time, though, we’d settle into our task of discerning that which had once
been alive from that which had not. It was then that our discoveries became
unmistakable: corals, worm tubes, brachiopods – the inhabitants of the ocean
world on which our modern world was built. For some reason, though, perhaps
because there were so many times that we only thought that we’d found one, my
memory is rather fuzzy regarding whether or not we were ever actually successful
in finding that most treasured of all specimens, at least for us, the
trilobite.
 |
| Trilobite |
When I think of my early fascination
with fossils, I think of my wonder at being able to hold in my very hands
something from a world so vastly different from the woodland habitat come sprawling
suburb that I’d grown up in that it might well have come from an alien planet,
a world so vastly distant in time as to be beyond human comprehension. And,
yet, that world was still going on. I was holding it in my hands. It was my world!
Childhood was a time filled with such
wonder – a time during which I felt more closely connected to nature more often
than at any other time. In fact, the thought sometimes crosses my mind that all
of my meditation practice since then, all of my efforts toward transcending the
self, all of my attempts at seeing only that which is and nothing more, are doing
nothing if not leading me back to that state that I was already intimate with
as a child – a state of wonder, a state of awe, a state in which the feeling of
being nestled in the palm of the universe was as real as that of holding that very
same universe in the palm of my still young hand.
Zen practice is rife with such
occurrences of wonder. When the mind becomes still – still enough to welcome
everything while desiring nothing, still enough to see only that which is,
without embellishment or detraction, still enough that the seer and the seen
are no longer two – wonder invariably arises. It is at times such as these that
the mind’s shell is cracked open by the simple sight of water dripping from the
eaves after a rain shower – sending shadows darting sideways across the sundrenched
wooden floor. It is at times such as these that the truest nature of light is
to be realized in the brilliant and fleetingly perfect alignment of the sun, a
piece of amber window glazing, the eye, and the mind. It is at times such as
these that the taste of rich green tea from a coarsely fashioned cup amidst
sparse surroundings could not possibly be improved upon. Such wonder can be
known whenever we allow ourselves to be truly alive – whenever we allow ourselves
to nestle in the palm of the universe, even as we hold it in the palm of our
hand. It is at times such as these that the essence of “things” is most readily
apparent – their luminosity, their suchness, their becoming, their interrelated
and ever-changing nature. At this point the reader might enjoy begin
sidetracked into reading the post entitled The Nature Of Things. Please also consider that the word ‘becoming’ is used
here instead of ‘being’ in order to accentuate the non-static nature of
reality.
Now, some people might wonder how
it is that a spiritual practitioner such as me, without a sense of an
overseeing God, without a sense of the existence of a soul that will either enjoy
its karmic fruit in its next life or despair at its retribution, can possibly
strive to live a moral, ethical, and other-focused existence. It is my
contention that wonder is the key. If
one can lead a life that never strays too far from wonder, then one will never be too far from guidance as to how one
should behave.
Image Credits
Trilobite Fossil
by DanielCD via:
Receptaculitid
from the Kimmswick Limestone by Wilson44691 via:
Onniella, a
brachiopod, by Dlloyd via:
Copyright 2012 by Maku Mark Frank
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