To be astonished is to taste freedom. To be willing to bathe in a sense of wonder is to be willing to abandon the bondage of all that you assume to know. Can you see that each moment is fresh and new? Can you see that you are new yourself in each moment. A movie screen fills itself with colors and shapes, scene after scene. Impossible movies find her. Fill yourself to the brim with miracles. They are fun. And they can do you no harm.
The miracle was not for Jesus to walk on water but that we can perceive miracles at all. Wonder. Awe. I set myself free in silent wonder and discovery over and over, like an innocent child.
Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Sonnets of Orpheus:
“Plump apple, smooth banana, melon, peach, gooseberry…
how all this affluence speaks life and death into the mouth.
I sense, observe it from a child’s transparent features while he tastes.
What miracle is happening in my mouth.
Instead of words, discoveries flow out from the ripe fruit,
astonished to be free.”
Yes, it’s all here isn’t it? Last week, we planted tomato seeds from a rare heirloom strain, seeds saved from the previous year. There was no knowing if this fragile life might sprout in black soil so seemingly rough. For seven mornings, nothing. Suddenly though, in the spell of what seemed only an hour, all of them at once popped up. Tendrils like silk threads. A human breath might fold them back into the earth. Impossible to take for granted the miracle that this occurs at all and that we get to witness this. Impossible to exclude the possibility that the seedlings are equally surprised: to enter light and photon streams, to sense wind and the humming of insects. “How the heck did we get here?”
How did we all come to be here, from where? Life: an astonished seed bank. Wonder as open listening may elicit questions. Which do not need answers. Like seeds and gods, questions are an offering to the space that is and that we are and that, in fact, is also already the answer. Perhaps this is the intuition of reality. Beyond words. In what reality is, whatever it is, it blooms and thrills, silent and ever in oscillation. Just this. Just so. Astonished to be free.
It will be months before there will be tomatoes, with sweet juices bursting from the skin astonished. If at all. Slugs and weather may map a different path. Already today, this, this moment of seeing. The simple enough-ness of it, a wonder.
