Open to Wonder

Here is another image from the same ordinary shopping mall, an experience of everyday wonder. It is possible to cultivate a way of living, a way of being, that is open to everyday wonder – sometimes called an experience of pure conscious awareness. These experiences of wonder cannot be forced but we can be available, though often taken by surprise.

Photography is for me a spiritual practice, a practice of contemplation, a practice of opening to everyday wonder as seen in through the camera lens and contemplated later on computer or as a print.

The experience of wonder is everywhere, waiting to be seen. Not just seen but also experienced in so many ways – through beauty, love, musical awe, the patterns and colours of the natural world, the awe-inspiring gaze into the infinitely small or infinitely large, the witness of self-less acts of compassion… and so on.

To be open to everyday wonder, to contemplate that which evokes wonder in us is, to allow the sacred to shine through. It is a shining and shimmering of the life energy of the universe which we may call the Infinite or the Divine.

Wonder is powerful. Even brief moments of awe and wonder are good for body and mind: self-criticism pauses, anxiety settles and mood lifts, even for a while. Wonder evokes a sense of worship - of gratitude to God or to the Universe for life itself, the life energy that pulses through this planet Earth and creates the possibiity of beauty, harmony and goodness.

As others have said:

“wisdom begins with wonder” - Socrates

”he who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead; his eyes are closed” - Albert Einstein

“to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour” - William Blake

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science.” Albert Einstein