WONDER

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

It Is The Final Week Of Our Stay At The

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.

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 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