The Age of Wonders

The work Christmas party, or holiday lunch, or winter overeating convention, whatever I should call it, and everyone’s talking about the disillusionment of Santa Claus.

We were a roomful of disapointed, pudging adults, shiny snowflakes pinned to the cubicle walls, winking at our sulking faces.

Santa Claus the fake. Wonder stabbed with the arrow of truth and leaked of all its life.

It’s funny, the myth of Santa. The obese elf delivering free toys to good kids once a year. A magical mystery tour around the world in an old-fashioned conveyor pulled by flying deer.

It’s such a fitting myth for a culture based on consumerism. The miracle of Hannukah is about oil staying lit for eight days; the miracle of Easter is a guy rising from the dead.

The miracle of the modern Christmas is free toys, no matter how rich or poor you are. And the reality it is covering up is that someone has to actually pay for the toys. Likewise, the myth of consumerism and capitalism is that if you’re ‘good’ enough, you have access to the goods and service ‘bad’ people can’t afford. The truth is, you have to pay for it, having nothing to do with your moral or ethical resume, it has to do with money.

And both the myth and the reality are grounded in the base idea that the most desirable thing to dream of and desire is the acquisition of unnecessary material goods.

It’s not really that wonder-full, really.

What’s sad to me is that this is what we focus our children’s innate sense of wonder upon – the flying Uncle Sam-Lookalike annual deposit into the American dream. And we accept that built into the system is the loss of wonder – when what can open our hearts and source our joy and spike our curiosity and infuse rote daily living with love but wonder and awe at the beauty and mystery that surrounds and forms us?

The innocence and joy that we tend to view as purely a function of childhood actually is available to all of us. It’s not age-dependent; it’s a function of the ability to wonder. It comes naturally to children, to whom the world is new. But how in the world do we ever think we have learned and know everything there is to know? All our wonder hung with the stockings by the chimney, when taken down it takes down the rest of our spirits?

There’s so much that could fill us with spontaneous awe and wonder that is real and could therefore sustain us through our lives, into the darkest and greyest of cubicles.

Don’t believe me?

Just go sit in the grass in your front yard for a while – eye-level with the grass. Watch. At first you might find yourself disappointed, bored. But look closer. Whole worlds and communities of existence thrive in that grass patch. The crazy dramas of spiders and photosynthesis spin and flame. It’s pretty amazing.

Or go to a museum – natural science, art. Pay attention – not to the tour guide, not to what you’re supposed to learn or remember – there’s no test. Just contemplate the things you see in and of themselves, see them for what they are.

Stare in the mirror. For a long time. At the arteries in your eyeballs. At the hairs in your nose. At your own self, looking at you.

Within the real, concrete things existing around you are more wonders and miracles than you know. And they are delivered to you, gifts from the universe, daily. It just takes clearing your calendar to make time and space to see the revelation at hand – on your hand, throbbing in your wrist, coursing through your body. Opening the eyes within your eyes to undo the illusion you’ve been under that there is nothing wonderful to witness or look forward to.

 

 

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