The Ten Thousand Wonders of the World

We've given up our sense of wonder, did you notice?

We don't need to wonder about things, we can just google it. We can find out the facts and intellectualize an experience or a thing in our experience. But in doing so we tend to replace the actual, real, truthful aspects of the thing or experience with ideas, definitions, and labels that we reference in our heads.

We seem to think we "know" what everything is after we've listed it under a label, and since we have a label, we decide we don't need to explore it further, we don't need to really examine it in our experience. That's part of the reason we don't notice the wonder in every little creation around us. Every tree and bug and bird has a marvelous world of its own, but we never dive into it and observe them anymore. We pass by things and let them pass us by without paying any attention to them, without wondering at them.

Even at ourselves!

What marvelous creatures we are, our bodies basically run themselves, beating our hearts, breathing, firing neurons. Every little creature and plant has these same sacred qualities of life, yet we basically ignore them. We see a tree and that's what it is to us, we label it and disregard it in our experience. How often do we give the trees a look of wonder, like how are you working? How often do we take them in in their full majesty? Seeing the incredible detail and amazing growth cycle, the way the leaves react to the slightest gust, rattling against eachother.

What about bugs? The world beneath our feet is so incredibly complex but we barely pay attention to it at all. The only thing bugs do is bug most of us. We squish them, swat them, kill them, but when do we take a good hard look at them and see how incredibly complex and beautiful they are. We see a spider and we think SPIDER! Diieeeeeeeee! Regardless of whether it's a tiny little harmless spider or not.

Why don't we wonder at things anymore? Have we learned everything already? Do we know how everything works, does google, do textbooks and documentaries and whatever other resources we have, do they know all the answers, do they know what's causing this miracle that we call life? Do they understand the inherent intelligence in nature?

It sure doesn't seem like it. It just seems like we've replaced the mystery in the world with false knowing, we're pretending to know. The kind of knowing where we think we understand things because we've defined and labeled them, not because we actually understand them.

There are wonders in this world everywhere we look, I step into my backyard and I just marvel at it. My lawn was exploding with life from the recent rains. There was the grass shooting up, dandelions shooting up and other plants thriving, plants we call weeds that have just as much beauty as the grass and flowers.

Just step out back and find the wonders of your yard, they're all around us.

Countless different bugs, each so detailed and complex looking you could observe it for a full fifteen minutes before you even understood it's shape. I've had flies land on me and I just think Damn fly, you're actually pretty amazing, you've got all these tiny hairs, brilliant eyes, lightning quick reflexes, and some weird elephant tongue thing to eat the dead skin or oil or whatever your grabbing off of me. Each one is unique among it's peers and their are thousands of varieties right beneath our feet.

It confuses me sometimes, how did I miss it before? How could I just pass by the incredible complexity and beauty in the world? Was I so trapped in my mind that I just took everything as the label that I and everyone else had given the thing. Each of these things has it's own wonder, each of these creatures is absolutely amazing. We live in this world with so much variety and beauty that we just ignore sometimes unless it's brand new to us. Once we see it we label it and then we can see it again and replace our awareness and wonder of it with our label and totally miss what's actually there.

Why not wonder at things, take a harder look, see what life reveals.

@jakeybrown