The Cathedral Quarterly: Wonder

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C AT H E D R A L Q U A R T E R L Y , SUMMER 2023

Wonder

E M A I L . V I S I T. F O L L O W.

www.jaxcathedral.org

@jaxcathedral.org

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S . COV E R A RT ,

by LAIRD . 5 ,

A Letter from the Dean by the Very Rev. Kate Moorehead Carroll . 6 ,

Practicing Wonder by the Rev. Mark S. Anderson . 12 ,

Sowing Seeds of Wonder: Sabbath by the Rev. Leah Robberts-Mosser . 16 ,

Pay Attention

by Malcom Doney and Martin Wroe . 19 ,

Mindful

by Mary Oliver . 21 ,

Epiphany

by Dacher Keltner . 24 ,

Wonder

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

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O U R M I S S I O N Inspired by the love of Jesus, we are building the kingdom of heaven, where differing people live in community, serving God and each other.

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A LETTER FROM THE DEAN

I W I L L G I V E T H A N K S T O YO U , O L O R D , W I T H M Y W H O L E H E A RT ; I W I L L T E L L O F A L L YO U R M A RV E L O U S W O R K S .

PSALM 9:1

Dear Friends, It is time for us to acknowledge that wonder is a form of devotion. When a scientist studies the workings of the natural world and is awe-struck by its beauty and complexity, this is a form of prayer. It is an acknowledgment of the wonder of creation; in that acknowledgment, there is implied wisdom in its design. Wonder transcends creed or doctrine. It is the faith of a small child marveling at the magnificence of a butterfly. And Jesus wanted our faith to be like that of the little child!

Charles Darwin has been long misunderstood and maligned by the church.

He spent his life using his remarkable power of observation to focus on large and small organisms. He was fascinated by how these organisms developed and interacted with one another. In the Origin of Species, he marvels at the perfection and genius of species adaptation and order. “A person would be dull who can examine the exquisite structure of a honeycomb, so beautifully adapted to its end, without enthusiastic admiration.” (p.224) But Darwin’s conjecture that species adapt from one another in the process of what he called natural selection threatened the notion of God as the single creator who shapes each creature. So Darwin became a threat when, in my opinion, he highlighted the ever-expanding genius of the Almighty. Darwin only threatened the church because our understanding of God was too narrow.

Wonder expands our minds. It catches our breath. It is a form of acute observation that opens the mind to new realities, new possibilities.

Suppose we are to appreciate the beauty and magnificence of this world that God has made. In that case, we must embrace wonder and hope so that its consequences involve a new relationship with the created order, one in which we protect and sustain instead of consume and destroy.

Open these pages and explore how wonder can open us to new possibilities in our relationship with God. In Christ’s love,

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P R AC T I C I N G WO N D E R by the Rev. Mark S. Anderson

WE EXPECT TO FIND WONDER IN THE BEAUTY OF A SUNRISE,

a butterfly’s fluttering, or a baby’s laughter. We expect to experience awe and amazement at the peak of a mountain or in the quiet of a fogcovered bay. But do we expect to find wonder in the back of a dusty closet, in the shadow of grief and loss, or in the request of a troublesome employee?

God invites us to experience wonder in the least expected moments.

Lynn was a long-time parishioner at a church where I served. When her children were young, birthdays always included a scavenger hunt. As her children grew into young adults, she continued this tradition during the holidays. She hid bottles of Christmas-themed beer around her house each Christmas, giving everyone a six-pack holder and promising all the beers to the first child who filled theirs. Lynn pointed out that she began this tradition after her youngest daughter turned twenty-one!

Lynn told her family there would be a massive scavenger hunt when she died; it would be the scavenger hunt against which all other scavenger hunts would be compared. As Lynn became increasingly ill, she regularly reminded her family of this climactic scavenger hunt.

But, when her children gathered in Lynn’s home after her funeral, they saw no evidence of this scavenger hunt. They saw photos on the walls, reminding them of fun times that would never be repeated, fishing poles that Lynn would never again cast, and a 1980s stereo that Lynn would never again blare late into the night.

They had forgotten the central lesson of Lynn’s scavenger hunts: the most mundane appearing container could hold a great surprise. God calls us to live with wonder; God calls us to gaze at the world around us with naïve, childlike amazement. And, frankly, that’s much easier to do when we’re atop mountains, celebrating weddings, or listening to an anthem sung by the Cathedral Choir.

As the years pass, pain and disappointment can cause us to become increasingly pessimistic and less prone to marvel at the beauty of creation. We, too, need to remember that the most mundane container can hold the best prize. God often calls us to find wonder in our ordinary, challenging, or even disappointing moments. . 6 ,

That’s what we read in the story of Eli and Samuel—an invitation to experience awe in the least expected circumstances. In 1 Samuel, we read about Eli, a governor, and his interactions with Samuel, a young intern. In this story, Samuel, wakes Eli three times during the night, thinking his boss has called him. The first two times Eli said he had not called. After Samuel awoke Eli a third time, Eli wondered if it was God calling Samuel, so he told Samuel: “Go, lie down, and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’”

This is certainly not the first reaction most of us would have today. If we receive a seemingly pointless call to our cell phone at 3 a.m., it’s bound to be a spam call. We’re not likely to wonder if God is at work. But God had been calling Samuel all along. And Samuel heard this call because Eli was searching for the awe and nearness of God when many of us would have been tired and frustrated.

The message for us is that God often speaks in the least glamorous moments, not on a mountaintop or at a glorious church service. The Bible makes clear that God can show up when we’re angry, frustrated, and tired. We’re invited to wonder and marvel at God’s presence in the least probable moments.

When a colleague offers a deep insight into our lives, do we stop and wonder if God may be speaking through our peer? When a homeless person asks us for change, do we recall that Jesus said he would be present when we see those who are hungry? When we’re asked to review a 3,000-line spreadsheet, do we remind ourselves that this can be a meditative prayer practice?

Alison Gopnik and Tom Griffiths, professors at the University of California, Berkeley, have studied two approaches we can take when we face new challenges: exploitation or exploration. We can exploit information we have already acquired, building on our preconceived assumptions, or we can explore the question in new ways and with an open mind.

When faced with a new challenge, the researchers found that adults typically exploit knowledge they already possess to find quickly a solution built on learned principles. This approach is often safe, minimizing the risk of a mistake. It is efficient and expedient: we don’t waste time on awe, amazement, or curiosity. Children, on the other hand, explore. Of course, this is at least in part because they have fewer experiences to exploit. . 7 ,

Exploration involves trying new ideas and stepping outside our comfort zones. This approach can be risky, but it can also lead to breakthroughs, to innovation as we marvel at new challenges and creatively explore new possibilities.

We are encouraged to be playful and curious, intrigued and amazed by the world around us. Jesus said: “Whoever takes the lowly position of a child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Notice that Jesus didn’t add an asterisk to the end of that command. He didn’t direct us to have childlike wonder unless we’re stressed, or frustrated, or nearing a deadline. We are called to search for God’s awesome presence every day, in the mundane as well as the spectacular.

This sort of childish naiveté is difficult to conjure when we face the painful challenges of life. It seemed inconceivable to Mary Magdalene on that first Easter morning when she found that the tomb of her beloved teacher was empty. Apparently, someone had stolen the body of Jesus.

She was distraught when she spoke to the gardener, hoping he could tell her where Jesus’ body had been taken. But, when the gardener used her name, there must have been a moment of cognitive dissonance: Mary knew that Jesus had died, but she heard this gardener speak with the voice of Jesus.

In that instant, she faced a decision. It was a decision that she made without even thinking because she had been practicing and preparing for this moment for years. She had been fostering a sense of awe, building amazement at God’s power, and practicing wonderment.

In that moment of grief and pain, in that moment of cognitive dissonance, Mary could have been driven by her grief, missing the awe and wonder of Jesus’ presence. However, Mary, following Jesus’ teachings, had long looked to God with awe and amazement. Even amidst challenges, she had practiced the curious and awe-filled exploration that Gopnik and Griffiths discuss. She had prepared herself to see the miraculous—and she did!

After Lynn died, her children didn’t think much about Lynn’s great scavenger hunt until they opened a drawer in a foyer table and found a key with a note scribbled on a scrap of paper: “Key to safe.”

What was the family’s first reaction? “She has a safe!” And so, the hunt began. After discovering the safe, they opened it to find an envelope sealed with the message: “To my youngest daughter. Open on your 50th birthday.” It won’t be opened until 2033. . 8 ,

As the hunt continued, surprises abounded: gifts in a sock drawer, a surprise hidden in an old pair of sneakers. Behind a book, they found Lynn’s mother’s engagement ring, resized for Lynn’s eldest daughter, with a heartfelt note explaining the ring’s significance. There were treasures in every nook and cranny of her house. And yet, these treasures could have been overlooked so easily.

The same is true of our lives: they abound with joy and surprises that we often neglect to acknowledge and celebrate. We often don’t even notice them because they appear in moments when we’re not expecting them.

It would have been so easy for Lynn’s family to see a shabby desk in her foyer, never find the key, miss the safe, and never discover Lynn’s note to her daughter. Many of us never would have taken the time to approach the shelf in the study, remove the book, and then find the ring—a family heirloom—and the beautiful note attached. And yet Lynn’s house, and our lives, are filled with so much beauty.

How often do we miss the wonder that surrounds us because we’re not in the mood to marvel at God’s creation? How often do we miss God’s call because it’s 3 a.m. and we’re exhausted? The challenge with a scavenger hunt is that you can’t be passive. You must search; you must hunt.

Treat this day as a scavenger hunt: seek beauty, find peace, experience joy, and know love! These experiences may not be immediately apparent.

They may be hidden amidst traffic, concealed in a lunch break. So, why not look? Why not set out on a scavenger hunt that could change your life? Why not make a point to wonder?

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T O T H E N AT U R A L P H I L O S O P H E R T H E R E I S N O N AT U R A L O B J E C T U N I M P O R TA N T O R T R I F L I N G … A S O A P BUBBLE…AN APPLE…A PEBBLE…HE WA L K S I N T H E M I D S T O F W O N D E R S .

~JOHN HERSCHEL, A P R E L I M I N A RY D I S C O U R S E O N T H E S T U DY O F N AT U R A L P H I L O S O P H Y (1830)

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DAY ART CLASS PAINTERS SYLVIA ARMSBY AND JANE REESE

capture wonder in these feathered subjects. Reese’s subjects are mother and chick and Armsby studies a curious duckling and a swan and her cygnets.

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SOWING SEEDS OF WONDER: S A B B AT H by the Rev. Leah Robberts-Mosser

THE BOOK “GATHERING SPARKS”

BY HOWARD SCHWARTZ BEGINS:

Once, when you were little, your grandfather came to visit.

That night the moon was full and the sky was filled with stars.

Your grandfather said, “The sky’s so clear tonight. Let’s go outside.”

So you went out into the yard, where fireflies lit up the dark and crickets chirped with all their might. You and your grandfather peered up at the sky, crowded with stars.

For a long time no one spoke, and then you asked, “Where did all the stars come from?”

And that’s when the grandfather begins to teach the little boy about faith and wonder and being a light in the world. That moment between grandfather and grandchild is only made possible because the grandfather was willing to take a Sabbath moment, to forget about the dishes in the sink, to forget about what time was bedtime, to forget about the things that needed to be picked up, and instead to say, “The sky is so clear, let’s go out and look at the stars.” Wonder is only possible when we are willing to live by God’s rules and take Sabbath space in our lives.

Friends, we are so much like horses that have been bridled and harnessed and have on our blinders. All we see so often is what’s directly in front of us, and, so often, particularly for folks like us, what we see in front of us is what we feel like we have to accomplish, what we feel like we must do, the work that must be done. Because, somehow, in this American experience, in this American “experiment,” our worth has . 12 ,

gotten attached to our work. And, so, we are constantly like work horses with blinders on: not able to see anything but what is in front of us. If we don’t take off those blinders, if we refuse to un-harness ourselves from the work— that’s always there! It’s always there—then, we’ll never see this beautiful world around us.

Barbara Brown-Taylor in a “Christian Century” article says that our willingness to constantly be working is a compulsion. Compulsions are defined as thoughts, urges, or behaviors that persist despite negatively affecting health, job, and relationships.

She begins the article by saying, “Sabbath was the day when Israel celebrated its freedom from compulsion, and on that day every week, the people did not work. Still, they were fed. On that one day of the week, they remembered that their worth lay not in their own productivity, but in God’s primordial love for them. Sabbath offered them a foretaste of heaven when they would lie back in God’s arms and behold the glory of creation for all eternity.” She says, “I remembered all of this several Sundays ago when I left home late for church. With nine miles to go and 15 minutes to travel them, I hardly noticed the dew-soaked cobwebs in the tall grass by the side of the road which the morning sun had turned into pockets of light. I barely glanced at the herd of deer grazing in the meadow and had less than my usual appreciation for the red-tailed hawk that lifted off from a fence post as I ruined his morning watch.”

She continues that, “for seven miles, I had the road all to myself, and, then, I roared up behind a red sports utility vehicle that was traveling significantly below the speed limit. The driver, who was all alone, was sipping a cup of something hot enough to steam in the cool morning air. As I rode his bumper, he admired the mountain view with one elbow propped up on his open window. All I could see,” she says, “was the solid yellow line that forbade me to pass him. He slowed down a little.

He slowed down! When he saw the Holstein cows circling the old Indian mound. As he turned his face toward them, I could see him smiling in his rear-view mirror. Finally—Ugh, finally!—he pulled over to read an historical marker that I had zoomed past wondering, who was doing a better job of observing the Sabbath?” . 13 ,

You can hear it in this story that she tells, can’t you? You can hear it.

You can see it all unfold: this guy has taken off his blinders. He has un-harnessed himself from the compulsion to work, to be busy for the sake of being busy, to constantly have something to do on their agenda, calendar, to-do list. That’s what the guy in front of her has done: he’s unharnessed self from all of that, and she is so frustrated because he’s getting in her way. Meanwhile, with her blinders on, she’s zooming right past all this wonderful creation.

It’s hard to do this in the world in which we live, where we can turn on the TV at any time of day and then be captivated by the news. It’s hard to do this when we can open up a browser on our phone at any time of day and be captivated by someone’s problems or some crisis or the list of things we didn’t get done this week. It’s hard to take off our blinders when we’re captives, but that’s the whole point of this Commandment. The Commandment to observe the Sabbath. It’s not a gentle suggestion. It’s not a “just in case you think about it.” No, this is a Commandment from God: once a week, free yourself from your compulsion to be captive to whatever has held you captive in this life and remember to rest. Remember that it’s not up to you to make the world run. Because, God says, “That’s my job, not yours.” Friends, we’re here at the beginning of summer, when every week, there’s something new in bloom; every week there’s something new at the farmer’s market.

In summer, creation is bursting all around us, and I would invite you, in this green season, to take off your blinders at least once a week, and, if not, for a whole day, then, at least, be able to find Sabbath moments throughout of your week, and, gosh, I actually hope that you do it that way, to release yourself from the compulsion to work; to remember it’s not up to you to run the world; to take off those blinders and simply be amazed by the wonder of it all. It’s only possible when we’re willing to Sabbath. Let’s do that this summer, yes?

Howard Schwartz and Kristina Swarner, “Gathering Sparks” Roaring Brook Press, 2010, pp. 1–4.

Barbara Brown Taylor, “Letting God Run Things without My Help” The Christian Century, 5 May 1999 . 14 ,

“EACH GRAIN OF DUST CONTAINS SOMETHING M A R V E L O U S ” says Joan Miró , the Spanish painter, “but in order to understand it, we have to recover the religious and magical sense of things that belong to primitive people.”

Indigenous tribes all over the world see the sacred in all things and rejoice in the discovery of new marvels. Curiosity is their vitamin.

In other cultures, it may be up to children to keep wonder alive.

They tutor adults in the art of surveying life with fresh eyes.

~ an excerpt from Spiritual literacy: Reading the spiritual in everyday life,

by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

L’ORO DELL’AZZURRO (1967) | Joan Miró . 15 ,

P AY AT T E N T I O N

by Malcom Doney and Martin Wroe excerpt from “Lifelines: Notes on Life and Love, Faith & Doubt”

T H E R E A R E T H E S E T W O YO U N G F I S H , S W I M M I N G A L O N G , A N D T H E Y H A P P E N TO M E E T A N O L D E R F I S H , S W I M M I N G T H E OT H E R WAY W H O N O D S AT T H E M , A N D S AY S , “ M O R N I N G B O Y S , H O W ’ S T H E WAT E R ? ” A N D T H E T W O YO U N G F I S H S W I M O N F O R A B I T, A N D T H E N E V E N T U A L LY O N E O F T H E M L O O K S O V E R AT T H E O T H E R A N D G O E S , “ W H AT T H E H E L L I S WAT E R ? ” ~ D AV I D F O S T E R WA L L A C E

I T I S E A S Y T O S L E E P W A L K T H R O U G H O U R D AY S .

Not to notice what’s going on. Our default position, argued novelist David Foster Wallace, is to be centered on ourselves and our own needs.

We are worshiping animals, he said, but our reverence is focused not on the mystical, the beyond, but on self-serving deities like money, intellect and power. Gods, that “will eat you alive.” If these are our sources of meaning, we’ll never be satisfied and will want more.

True, they kind of work. We’ve harnessed them to put ourselves at the center of everything. But, said Wallace, there are other kinds of freedom: “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to care truly about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways every day.”

We have to explore the water that we are swimming in. Examine it.

Paying attention to each other and to the vividness of the physical surroundings that lie beyond our personal murk. We find dividends by focusing in on the detail. In his book Landmarks, the nature writer . 16 ,

Robert MacFarlane notes the words people used to describe features of the landscape, borne out of daily, close observation. This is more than pedantry: It prevents our environment becoming a foggy “blandscape.”

Such generalization is dangerous, he claims, quoting Wendell Berry: “People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love…and to defend what we love, we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.”

Novelist Patrick Kavanaugh agrees: “To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience...it is depth that counts, not width.”

This is how the parochial opens the door to the universal. The forensic but wonderful naming of the particular, which arises from our attentive embodiment in nature, can, MacFarlane assures us, lead to experiences that are “midway between scientific experiment and sacred epiphany.”

“It is about simple awareness,” says Foster Wallace, “Awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over. This is water. This is water.”

David Foster Wallace, This is Water: Some thoughts, delivered on a significant occasion, about living a compassionate life, Little Brown and Company, 2009 Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle, Counterpoint Press, 1985; Patrick Kavanaugh, ‘The Parish and the Universe,’ in Collected Prose, MacGibbon and Kee, 1967 Macfarlane, Landmarks

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Parishioner Kathie Meuselbach painted this image in St. John’s Cathedral’s day art class. A bird flew in the sanctuary on Sunday during the morning worship and landed on the Rev. Mark Anderson’s shoulder as he said prayers. . 18 ,

MINDFUL

By Mary Oliver

Every day ….I see or hear ……..something …………that more or less kills me ….with delight, ……..that leaves me …………like a needle in the haystack ….of light. ……..It was what I was born for – …………to look, to listen, to lose myself ….inside this soft world – ……..to instruct myself …………over and over in joy, ….and acclamation. ……..Nor am I talking …………about the exceptional, the fearful, the dreadful, ….the very extravagant – ……..but of the ordinary, …………the common, the very drab, the daily presentations. ….Oh, good scholar, ……..I say to myself, …………how can you help but grow wise ….with such teachings ……..as these – …………the untrimmable light of the world, ….the ocean’s shine, ……..the prayers that are made …………out of grass? . 19 ,

A respected Jacksonville photographer, Laird has created a body of work he calls “cphace” images. The images exhibit a mastery of technique and a creativity that utterly transform his natural subjects.

The cover image is an elephant ear plant in Leu Gardens, Orlando, Florida. The image above was taken in Freeport, the Bahamas. Laird captures the images with a converted camera that records infrared waves of the electromagnetic light spectrum, something that is invisible to the naked eye. The images are manipulated and enhanced with color variations. The results are symmetrical images of organic forms with a central axis. With each image, nature becomes a bit less complex in color but more complex in its shapes, textures, and lines. . 20 ,

EPIPHANY

by Dacher Keltner excerpt from Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform your Life T H E B I G I D E A O F AW E : W E A R E PA RT O F S Y S T E M S L A R G E R T H A N T H E S E L F. W H I L S T T H I S P L A N E T H A S G O N E C Y C L I N G O N , A C C O R D I N G T O T H E F I X E D L AW O F G R AV I T Y, F R O M S O S I M P L E A BEGINNING, ENDLESS FORMS, MOST BEAUTIFUL AND MOST W O N D E R F U L H AV E B E E N , A N D A R E B E I N G , E V O LV E D . ~ C H A R L E S DA RW I N

Darwin’s emotions so often gave rise to his big ideas, including the science of emotion, of which the story of awe is but one chapter. Caring for his 10-year-old daughter Annie until her death shaped his thinking about the evolutionary benefits of sympathy. His humble curiosity about fellow human beings brought Darwin, of a privileged background, into conversations with working class pigeon breeders, opening his eyes to their science of breeding species for signature qualities or adaptations.

His kind cheerfulness on the Beagle held the crew together as Captain Robert Fitzroy suffered a nervous breakdown and enabled a 5 1/2-year voyage of incomparable and inexplicable wonders.

Might awe have shaped Darwin’s thinking about evolution?

In The Descent of Man in 1871 and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, Darwin locates the emotions we experience today and the vast story of mammalian evolution. Reading his descriptions of more than 40 emotional expressions is an epiphany, as rich a portrayal of emotional expression as any, except perhaps that of Japanese artist Kobayashi Kiyochika’s print series “100 Faces” from 1883.

But Darwin never used the word awe in those descriptions.

Perhaps awe – so often a religious emotion – was a psychic battleground for him. To tell a story about the mammalian evolution of awe would challenge the creationist dogma of his era, one his devout wife Emma hewed to. That dogma held that our self-transcendent emotions, emotions like bliss, joy, sympathy, gratitude and awe, are the handiwork of God placed into human anatomy and our social lives by some form of intelligent design. Perhaps Darwin was avoiding awe to keep the peace at home. . 21 ,

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F I R E F L I E S | Ts u n e a k i H i r a m a t s u . 23 ,

WONDER

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil excerpt from World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks and Other Astonishments

I T I S T H E F I N A L W E E K O F O U R S T AY AT T H E

Grisham House, a ten-month residency during the academic year on seventy-seven acres just outside Oxford, Mississippi. It is highly possible my family will never have this much land all to ourselves ever again, so most of our time is spent outdoors. One of the many reasons we wanted to stay in this area was because we could spend more time outdoors in this beautiful town – this ‘velvet ditch’ as the locals lovingly refer to it – in the green and verdant northern part of the state.

One of the biggest treats during this final week is the abundance of fireflies. With the lights of the estate completely turned off, at first we see nothing – but patience is rewarded when a majestic illumination dots the already humid May air. This past year, under so much wide-open sky and not having to worry about oncoming cars, my sons could fully see the stars without much light pollution for the first time in their young lives. They could pick out constellations readily because, when I lived in Arizona, their grandfather showed me how to do the same. They could identify the Milky Way – the stream of stars – as it pours itself over the estate, and marvel. They don’t want to go indoors, ever. They want to stargaze long past their bedtime.

It is this way with wonder: It takes a bit of patience, and it takes putting yourself in the right place at the right time. It requires that we be curious enough to forgo our small distractions in order to find the world. When I teach National Poetry Month visits in elementary schools, I sometimes talk about fireflies to conjure up memory and sense of the outdoors.

Recently, however, seventeen students in a class of twenty-two told me they had never even seen a firefly – they thought I was kidding, inventing an insect. . 24 ,

2019 was a banner year for fireflies for much of the Midwest and East coast. The perfect amount of Spring wetness combined with a not too severe winter to produce a dazzling display during peak firefly season, mid-June through mid-July. ...photographer Tsuneaki Hiramatsu shot photos in eight second exposures of a field where fireflies congregated then digitally overlapped some of these photos, and the result could easily be mistaken for the night sky; the heavens and earth are lush, luminescent sisters.

It was a sad day when I had to bring up a video online to prove that fireflies do indeed exist and to show what a field of them looks like at night...

“Where does one start to take care of living things amid the dire and daily news of climate change and reports of another animal or plant vanishing from the planet? How can one even imagine us getting back to a place where we know the names of the trees we walk by every single day? A place where a bird navigating a dewy meadow is transformed into something more specific, something we can hold onto by feeling its name on our tongues: brown thrasher or, that big tree, catalpa. Maybe what we can do when we feel overwhelmed is start small. Start with what we have loved as kids and see where that leads us.”

For me, what a single firefly can do is this: it can light a memory. I thought was long lost in roadsides overrun with Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod, a peach pie cooling in the window of a distant house.

It might make me feel like I’m traveling again to a gathering of loved ones dining seaside on a Greek island, listening to cicada song and a light wind rustling the mimosa trees. A single firefly might be the spark that sends us back to our grandmother’s backyard to listen for whippoor-wills, the spark that sends us back to splashing in an ice-cold creek bed, with our jeans rolled up to our knees, until we shudder and gasp, our toes fully wrinkled. In that spark is a slowdown and tenderness.

Listen: Boom. Can you hear that? The cassowary is still trying to tell us something. Boom. Did you see that? A single firefly is, too such a tiny light, for such a considerable task. Its luminescence could very well be the spark that reminds us to make a most necessary turn – a shift and a swing and a switch – toward cherishing this magnificent and wondrous . 25 ,

planet. Boom. Boom. You might think of a heartbeat – your own. A child’s. Someone else’s. Or something’s heart. And in that slowdown, you might think it’s a kind of love. And you’d be right.”

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a poet who teaches English and creative writing at the MFA program at the University of Mississippi.

Editorial reviews for World of Wonders: “Sometimes we need teachers who remind us how to be flabbergasted and gobsmacked and flummoxed and enswooned by the wonders of this earth. How to be in stupefied and devotional love to the wonders of this earth. How to be in love with this, our beloved earth. Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders is as good and generous a teacher as one could ever ask for. This book enraptures with its own astonishments and reveries while showing us how to be enraptured, how to revere. Which, again, is showing us how to be in love. I can think of nothing more important. Or wonderful.”

—Ross Gay, author of The Books of Delights

“These are the praise songs of a poet working brilliantly in prose.

Each essay compresses a great deal of art and truth into a small space, whether about fireflies or flamingos, monkeys or monsoons, childhood or motherhood, or the trials and triumphs of living with a brown skin in a dominant white world. You will not find a more elegant, exuberant braiding of natural and personal history.”

—Scott Russell Sanders . 26 ,

C AT H E D R A L Q U A R T E R LY E D I T O R I A L B O A R D Owene Courtney The Rev. Dr. Linda Privitera Nancy Purcell, Managing Editor A DV I S O R The Very Reverend Kate Moorehead Carroll

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TWO THINGS FILL MY MIND WITH EVER NEW AND INCREASING WONDER A N D AW E , T H E M O R E O F T E N A N D P E R S I S T E N T LY I R E F L E C T U P O N T H E M : T H E S TA R RY H E A V E N A B O V E M E A N D T H E M O R A L L AW W I T H I N M E . I S E E T H E M I N F RO N T O F M E A N D U N I T E T H E M I M M E D I AT E LY W I T H T H E C O N S C I O U S N E S S OF MY OWN EXISTENCE. I M M A N U E L K A N T, C R I T I Q U E O F PRACTIC AL REASON (1788)

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