A Bit of Wonder

Walking through the trees, after a rain or a heavy dew, I am afforded the opportunity to catch the sun against an array of spiderwebs.  Each web fills me with a sense of wonder.  One minute, I see every radial, delicate dew drops strung along each thread, lines crisscrossing against themselves.  A step later, the entire web has disappeared.  The sunlight and water create visibility in the plane in which I am standing.  Walking even five paces further, I can turn back, and they’ve all disappeared from sight.

There are times when I feel my own loneliness seeping in like the dense fog, I found drifting out of the bottomlands this morning. It’s disheartening to feel so cut off from the people I love, as if I have no place to inhabit that matters.  And there are moments in which I feel so connected to life that the same emptiness feels like grace, some kind of unbounded potential or momentary fullness that satiates me totally.  

If I could just stand still, in a bit of wonder now and then, in just the right place, I might understand that the structure of who I am is constant, the paths I travel serve a purpose, and the relationships I have are not variable, but are all crossings on an interconnected life growing from a center, stretching out far beyond my own breadth.  

It’s good to remind myself that vantage point is everything.