Amazement
how to cultivate wonder and awe
I’ve been working with a new series I call Flowers of the Dark. My inspiration comes from exploring exciting dark colors, but also from reflecting on the nature of insight and suffering. It seems a suitable focus as we finally emerge from the long, cold upstate NY winter into the respite of spring.
Winter, the seasonal equivalent to the dark night of the soul, slowly surrenders to the early colors of hellebores and daffodils. I watch anxiously as my Japanese maples offer their first tender buds. It is a heartbreaking drama to see snow on my cherry blossoms, and frost on the first fiddleheads, but most survive.
My clients, too, are blooming. Smiles cross the faces of those previously stiff with endurance. Expansion into the outdoors magnifies home spaces, bringing back surges of fresh air, energy and optimism.
We emerge, too, when we rise from suffering on the crest of insight. We all know the story of the lotus which starts its journey in mud before breaking into flower at the surface of the water. We witness literal metaphors that flood our senses during springtime, and rejoice.
Can there be spring without winter? Can there be insight without struggling with decision, contradiction, and grief?
The jewels of wisdom don’t reveal themselves easily. We pay for each and every one with our days. But once we see them, they are everywhere.
I notice that when I experience amazement, I seem to have let go of everything about myself that resists amazement. With wonder, I am still there, just a trickle of myself that remains wondering, but amazement is like swallowing a helium balloon and expanding with it. I think it is the sensation that opens more than any other. I am not sure that “sensation” is the right word. I feel filled with light when I am amazed, but I don’t think it is a feeling exactly. Closer to awe, it hovers at the precipice of complete self-abandonment to the glory of being. As if one were on the highest mountain but simultaneously experiencing the valley and plateau. Lifted by amazement we sail beyond the personal. In fact, I think amazement is the sensation of the transpersonal embodied.
If you feel this way about amazement, or some other way altogether, please share your thoughts.
Namaste,
Leslie
I love listening to your newsletters, Leslie. I can hear in your voice the very thing you are describing and it feels like a true beckoning. I think as I’ve grown older more and more things amaze me. And since you are talking about spring, I will just say that one thing that really amazed me this year was how the silence of winter one day just broke into birdsong. To me it feels like a response to the question you’re asking about whether we need winter to have spring. It seems like the answer is yes. The hope and even joy that welled up in me when I heard the birdsong I think could only arise after such a long period of lack.
So thank you as always for your invitation, you’re beckoning. And I love your painting. 🙏
Amazement. Perhaps it's the ideal condition in which to experience art, whether in the act of creation or beholding. Maybe it's not a condition at all, but being lifted out of condition.
One might behold even one's own artistic creations with amazement, discovering that one's work exceeded one's expectations of oneself.
Perhaps the enemy of Amazement is Expectation.
I just looked up the word Amaze in the dictionary, expecting (...EXPECTING) to confirm that the root of Amaze was Maze, but, NO!
*Old English āmasian, of unknown origin.*
I peer into etymologies, and Old English and Old Norse dictionaries when writing, looking for words with power.
And is it not amazing that we are not in fact "lost in a maze" when we transcend ourselves in astonishment and awe.
Maybe this is a key insight for me.
Or maybe it's not that amazing... the prefix a- is common in Old English...
drifting off here into thoughts about the thing-ness of nouns and conditioned-ness of our souls... our ways of seeing/being.