Collect...........................

 

..................................small astonishments.

Choosing...................

 

    At the same time, we must take care to protect the sovereign domain of our personal tastes and proclivities as well as our sense of wonder.  Choosing the right music for pleasure or for healing is never going to be one-size-fits-all affair.  Even setting aside therapeutic uses, our tastes change over the course of a life or even a day.  If I've just heard my favorite song six times in a row, I may not want to hear it again.  The right music is whatever music is right for us at any given time and place.

-Daniel J. Levitin,  I Heard There Was A Secret Chord:  Music as Medicine

In such silence and stillness............

 

...the mind wanders wide ... and wonders never cease.

the detailed complexity............

 

     When we say that human behavior is unpredictable, we are right because it is too complex to be predicted, especially by ourselves.  Our intense sensation of interior liberty, as Spinoza acutely saw, comes from the fact that the ideas and images that we have of ourselves are much cruder and sketchier than the detailed complexity of what is happening within us.  We are the source of amazement in our own eyes.

-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Reading with a dictionary at hand.............

 

     Bear in mind that equivocity is true to being only as one way of attending to and speaking of being.  It is true to being as relative to being and as relative to the other senses of being.  Against ironic postmodern truth-refusal and metamodern oscillations between sincerity and indifference at the expense of truth, Chesterton guides his readers to notice how preconceptions can warp attention and prevent clear perception.  This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in his detective fiction, which draws attention to puzzlement and indefiniteness, as well as the unexplained intractabilities of reality.  Fitting the metaxological mode of attention at the heart of Chesterton's journalistic metaphysics, his interest is in restoring the adventurous side of life where the comfort of the overly familiar has caused us to lose our primal astonishment and foundational perplexity.  How can we feel at home if we have lost a sense of wonder?  That would not be home but a prison for the soul.  And how can we truly wonder if we have no place of refuge?  Without a safe haven, wonder turns into terror.

      Chesteronian defamiliarization may be misunderstood as an attempt to restore passivity to the perceiver, given that univocity tends to put people in an active relationship with reality, albeit still unconscious and devoid of reflective reasoning.  This is only part of the truth.  As suggested, Chesterton wants to resist the "worship of law," especially the worship of arbitrary human laws, by restoring difference.  But the deeper aim of this strategy is to restore the possibility of genuine consciousness and real choice; that means recovering participation in reality.

-Duncan Reyburn, The Roots of the World: The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton

worthy suggestions....................

 

Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing.

-Richard Powers, Bewilderment

Can't wait..................

 

I'm hoping to be astonished tomorrow by I don't know what.

-Jim Harrison

A worthy goal...........................

......................to live life in radical amazement.

Unimaginable................

 

                    via

                     enlargeable photo and description here

The wonder and mystery of it all.......

 

description and enlargeable photo here

borrowing........................

We borrow our atoms.
The universe owns them.

The universe borrows our love and wonder.
Those belong to us.

-Jarod K. Anderson

photo via

Life skills..................

 it is an astonishment to be alive, and it behoves you to be astonished.

-attributed to John Donne

On beauty..........................

      I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe.  In the film Contact, when Jodie Foster's character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, "They should've sent a poet."  I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn't out there, it's down here, with all of us.

-William Shatner, Boldly Go: Reflections of a Life of Awe and Wonder

radical amazement......................

 

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement.       . . . get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.

-Abraham Joshua Heschel

Opening paragraphs........................

       Whether the photographer, who would forever remain anonymous, felt the conceivably immense pressure we will never know.  But with the head of the nation and the soul of the nation's preservation movement, both rugged, demanding, and outspoken men, paired together for a brief time, posted against arguably the nation's most transcendent and iconic landscape, a long journey by train, horseback, and boot from any major city, the stakes in making a good image were high.

-Dean King, Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship That Saved Yosemite

untethered............................

 Our senses often misperceive data.  And our minds don't have the processing power to take in all information surrounding us.  Our senses would be overwhelmed by light, color, sound, and smell.  We would not be able to distinguish one object from another.

     To navigate our way through his immense world of data, we learn early in life to focus on information that appears essential or of particular interest.  And to tune out the rest.

     As artists, we seek to restore our childlike perception: a more innocent state of wonder and appreciation not tethered to utility or survival.

-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

Surfing...................

 .............................................the APOD site:

A worthy goal...................

 

Content...........................

 I am content to place humankind at the center of Creation.  We are complex enough, interesting enough.  What we have learned, limited as we must assume it to be, is wonderful even in the fact of its limitations.

-Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness Of Things

image via

rare...........................

 The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it's the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.

-Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals