Wonder Under Weight

I was out dashing, listening to Jim Reeves sing I’ll Fly Away.

I don’t remember exactly what I was looking at.
Just the ordinary things that pass through the windshield all day.

Streets. Houses. People walking somewhere.
Cars moving from one place to another. Trees along the road.
Storefronts I have passed enough times that I barely notice them anymore.

And I was simply wondering.

A line in the song mentioned God’s celestial shore, and for some reason the word caught me.

Celestial.

I looked at the world around me and thought:

Earth is a celestial body. So why, whenever we imagine celestial beings, do we imagine someone else?

I’ve heard language like that all my life.

Heaven above. Earth below.
Celestial beings somewhere beyond us.
Gods entering the human world.
Angels descending. Souls ascending.

And beyond religion, we do something similar with aliens.

Beings arriving from somewhere out there.
Usually more advanced. More intelligent.
More capable. More mysterious than us.

Different cultures tell very different stories, of course.

Gods. Spirits. Ancestors.
Devas. Angels. Demigods.
Star beings.

But there is a curious movement that seems to repeat.

The extraordinary lives elsewhere.

Which is strange when you think about it.

Earth is traveling through the cosmos.
We emerged from it.
Our bodies are made from the same material as everything else out there.

As far as we currently know, we are the only beings capable of looking into the universe and knowing that we are looking.

In the most literal sense, we are the only celestial beings we actually know.

Yet somehow human has come to sound almost like the opposite of celestial.

As though being human were an ordinary thing.

And while I kept driving, another thought arrived.

Perhaps wonder is the first thing we learn to outsource.

Children do not seem to need much help wondering.

A bug crossing the pavement. A puddle after rain. A strange sound.
The moon following the car. Their own fingers moving.
A question asked again even though we are certain we already answered it.

Nothing has to announce itself as extraordinary.

The world simply is.

And somehow that is enough.

Then we begin learning.

We learn names. We learn categories.
We learn what things are for. We learn what matters and what doesn’t.

Useful and useless.
Important and unimportant.
Ordinary and extraordinary.
Sacred and mundane.
Possible and impossible.

We learn what deserves our attention.
We learn what we are supposed to become.

And perhaps somewhere inside all that necessary learning,
we also learn that wonder belongs to certain things.

A sunset.
A miracle.
A cathedral.
A mountaintop.

A distant galaxy.
A god.
An angel.
An alien.

Something rare enough, beautiful enough, powerful enough, or far enough away to deserve astonishment.

Wonder begins to need an object.

And gradually we send it somewhere else.

Maybe that is part of what happens when we grow up.

Not that the world becomes less wondrous.
We become less available to it.

A child can spend ten minutes watching an insect cross the pavement.
An adult can walk directly past it while thinking about the next appointment.

The insect has not changed.

Something else has.

We accumulate weight.

Schedules. Responsibilities. Bills.
Expectations. Loss. Ambition. Survival.
Identity. Performance.

We carry what happened yesterday.
We carry what needs to happen tomorrow.

We carry what others need from us.
We carry what we have learned we need to be in order to belong.

And we learn enough about the world that naming something can begin to feel like seeing it.

That is the moon.
That is a tree.
That is my child.
That is my body.
That is another person.
That is life.

The name settles over the mystery.

Familiarity settles over astonishment.

Wonder does not necessarily disappear.
It goes under weight.

Maybe wonder arises from inhabited presence.

Not from encountering something extraordinary.
From actually being present enough to encounter what is already there.

I spend hours on the road now.

The same intersections.
The same shopping centers.
The same restaurants.
The same stretches of Milwaukee Avenue.

People crossing streets.
Someone carrying groceries. Someone waiting for a bus.
A parent buckling a child into a car. A worker standing behind a counter.
A person opening a door to receive dinner from a stranger.

Most of it is completely ordinary.
Until, occasionally, it isn’t.

Nothing changes outside.
I just happen to be there enough to notice it.

And maybe that is what wonder is.

Not something the world occasionally performs for us.

Something that becomes possible when we actually inhabit our presence within it.

I used to think of wonder as lightness.
Something that lifts us beyond ordinary life.

Maybe that is why our images of the celestial so often escape gravity.

Angels have wings.
Souls rise.
Gods live above.
Heaven is somewhere we fly away to.

But the only celestial life we actually know is life under gravity.

Bodies with weight. Feet on pavement.
Bones carrying us through time.
People carrying histories no one else can completely see.

We are beings of the cosmos who do not float through it. We stand on it.

Perhaps that matters.

Maybe wonder is not what happens when we escape the weight.
Maybe wonder is what becomes visible when we become present enough to inhabit life while carrying it.

The strange fact that this hand moves when I intend it to.
That another consciousness can look back at me through a pair of eyes.

That people who once did not exist somehow came into being.
That every stranger I pass contains a world inaccessible to me.

That a seed becomes a tree. That grief exists because something mattered enough to leave an absence.
That atoms forged in ancient stars somehow became creatures capable of asking where the stars came from.

None of this becomes less remarkable because we can explain some of it.

And yet explanation itself can become another layer of weight.

We understand enough to stop noticing.

Maybe wisdom is not the opposite of wonder.
Maybe wisdom is wonder after weight.

The first wonder comes before we know very much.
The later wonder comes after we know enough to recognize how little our knowing diminishes the mystery.

One arrives easily. The other returns.
Not a return to ignorance. A return to presence.

The child looks at the night sky because it has never seen anything like it.

The older person may look at the same sky knowing something about galaxies, light-years, gravity, mortality and time—

and somehow find it astonishing again.

Perhaps that second wonder carries more weight.

It knows what life costs. It knows bodies fail.
It knows people leave. It knows tomorrow is not owed.
It knows how much of life gets spent producing, proving, protecting and performing.

And still—

there is the moon. There is another person beside us.
There is breath entering the body without being asked.
There is this little planet traveling through darkness.

There is today.

Maybe we did not lose wonder because the world became ordinary.
Maybe the world became ordinary because we learned to place wonder somewhere else.

In childhood. On vacation.
In worship. On mountaintops.

In miracles. In heaven.
Among gods. Among aliens.

Anywhere but here.

But perhaps wisdom remembers what the child had not yet learned to forget.

The wonder was never there instead of here.
It was here too.
It was here first.

And maybe the invitation is not to throw the weight away.

Some of it cannot be thrown away.
Some of it should not be.

Responsibility has weight. Love has weight. Memory has weight.
Being known has weight. Being needed has weight. Being alive has weight.

Perhaps the work is learning to inhabit presence while carrying it.

To discover that wonder did not leave when the weight arrived.
It simply became harder to see.

That the celestial was never only above us.
That the extraordinary was never only elsewhere.
That we did not need wings before we belonged to the heavens.

We have been traveling through them the whole time.

Sometimes without noticing.
Sometimes while delivering someone’s dinner.

Feet firmly on the ground.
Wonder under weight.