Wonderment During Times Of War

"Always be on the look out for the presence of wonder." E.B. White

(art by Ukrainian artist Olga Kvasha)

Birdsong in the morning - offering the continued promise of beauty in a world bent on war, destruction, devastation and death. A hymn from the branches of old oaks to remind me that we, too, can rise above such instincts and take flight - to soar in cloud filled skies and beyond. I think about how I was able to travel in just over fourteen hours from the state where I live to Seoul, Korea. This is something unheard of during even my grandparents’ time. Papa Fred, my grandfather on my Mother’s side, went from seeing the birth of flight to air travel to man landing on the moon. Great strides of exploration. He also saw the birth of the nuclear bomb and the horrors it produced when dropped on Japan. We continue to see new marvels and inventions, though often without considering the ultimate cost to humanity as a whole.

As I ate my small bowl of yogurt and berries, with a splash of juice squeezed from a lime to give it a little tartness, I wonder why we are so often selfish and self-destructive. I found myself asking: How does one find wonder in a world in which there is continued genocide of another people, another land and we just watch on in the comfy, coziness of our homes? How do we not see they are our people, our land - a part of of myself, of humanity?

I go to wash my bowl and I notice the white butterfly fluttering among the garden flowers speaking of renewal and rebirth. Hope causes its wings to open and close. Hope causes my lungs to breathe in and out. Hope causes my heart to beat.

The poet William Blake wrote, “Everything that lives is Holy.”

Why do we so quickly forget this? Why do we take that to mean only ourselves and those who believe and live as we do?

The continued news fills me with sorrow, with mourning, with anger, with grief. Peace can never come with violence.

Bees buzz around the blooms of the Rose of Sharon with its white petals and a shock of blood red in the center. Cardinals, both males and both bright red, are at the feeders. Red the color of human blood. Spilled again and again amidst tears shed - both soaking the earth with our woundedness.

The novelist Vladimir Nabokov said in one of his lectures, “This capacity to wonder at trifles — no matter the imminent peril — these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.”