How to Summon Wonder

First, forget what you came for.

Let your errand dissolve like sugar

in the back of your mind. You are now

officially lost, though only a little.

*

Find something ordinary. A bottle cap

works well, or a dandelion pushing through

concrete, or the way brake lights bloom

in sequence down a wet street.

*

Crouch if you need to. Get your face

close enough to see what you've been

missing: the serrated edge, the small

structure of survival, the pattern

that repeats because it must.

*

Ask the wrong questions. Ask "What is this?"

in the form of "How did this become?"

Ask "Why here?" as "What journeyed to arrive?"

*

Trace the lineage backward,

the factory, the seed, the decision

made by engineers, or evolution,

or blind necessity.

*

Now expand. Let your attention

drift to the periphery. Notice

the light has changed while you

were looking. Notice the couple

arguing in the parking lot has made up

or driven away. Notice how much

goes on without you, how the world

is outrageously itself, and keeps being,

and doesn't need your witness,

yet offers it anyway.

*

Feel the hinge of it, how small

you are, how vast everything else is,

and how you're allowed to touch it.

This moment, this dandelion, this

utterly unlikely fact of being here

with eyes that work and a mind

that keeps wondering.

*

The wonder arrives now, if it's coming.

It is not a lightbulb that turns on, rather a slight

pause in the breath, a softness

in the chest, the sense that you've been

handed something precious, and you can't

remember why you thought

you'd seen it all before.

*

You can't make it stay. That's not

part of the instructions. Just notice

when it leaves, and know

where you knelt when it came.

*

Mark the spot somehow. You'll need it

on the ordinary days, to remember

that astonishment is a skill

you can practice, a door that opens

from the inside, a feeling that arrives

when you stop waiting and start

looking at what's already here.