Today’s prompt: “How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?”
I don’t know what anyone else did this year, but I took pictures.
This is from an oak tree in my parents’ front yard. I took it this afternoon on a whim. I was out there taking pictures of a cat. I paused for a second to snap this one as I walked by the tree. It’s quick, and it’s blurry, and it’s unplanned. I didn’t stop to study the tree or to think about how to get the best shot of it.
If I’m really trying to capture just the right thing, I might take hundreds of pictures of a single acorn, but that wasn’t what I did today. This is my only shot of the acorns. I didn’t expect anything from it. When I opened it up on the computer to see what I had, though, my mother, my sister, and I all said, “Oh!”
It’s December. Everything is looking somewhat brown. I didn’t particularly consider that there might be pieces of green beauty to be scavenged from this brown yard, but here we have one. I found an “oh” moment, an invocation of wonder. That’s why I love my camera. I never know what it is going to reveal to me about the world around me.
Here’s another one.
This was one of the first pictures I took after I bought my camera in January of this year. I couldn’t tell what I was seeing. I only spotted some color amongst the weeds. I thought I had found a rare winter flower petal. It was only when I pulled it onto the computer that I could tell I was looking at was a piece of trash. This was fireworks debris from New Year’s Eve. It isn’t particularly lovely once you know what it is, but then again, maybe there is something to it after all–a small bit of wonder in an otherwise drab yard.
And how about this yellow jacket and the tiny drop of water on the grass?
Or this one, another quick and blurry where we get to see the reflection of the Daddy Long Legs in the side of the berry bucket?
Or this one, where I did not notice until after the fact that there was a fly in the azalea?
Then, of course, there was the bunny I almost caught flying through the air in an effort to get away from me.
All of the little accidental moments bring such wonder into my life.
Life is stressful, uncertain, and full of worries, but there is transcendence to be found. There is wonder. For some of us, that wonder comes in the little things.
Picking up a camera, I think, is an act of faith. It is a way of saying to yourself the world is not forsaken. On the surface, the landscape of my life may appear grim, but if I step out there and look around with nothing more than hope as my guide, what beauty there is will find me.
Maybe that is what people mean when they say they know Grace.
