No Small Wonder

It’s those unexpected details in life that can astonish you sometimes, like little thieves waiting for an unwary tourist around a corner.

Ants coming out two days before it rains. Burro dung holding up adobe walls for two hundred years. A hummingbird’s heart beating over a thousand beats per minute. A blue whale’s tongue weighing as much as an elephant. Humans owing their existence to pollinators, and the sun’s proximity to Earth. Trees working tirelessly while appearing impossibly still. Your body’s ability to digest food with its own consciousness. Plants turning to face the sun.  These are no small wonders.

The slant of the light at a particular moment. Steam rising from a bowl of soup. A certain smell accessing a fountain of memories in your brain: maybe cigar smoke, the interior of a car, the pages of a book, a bakery. A song opening a door inside you. Behind that door, a chapter of your life, a whole sweeping vista of memories, visions, emotions.

Naturally, all this astonishment exhausts you. But it’s a healthy exhaustion, like the one you experience after a long day of good hard physical work, or an hour of lovemaking, or an afternoon spent swimming in ocean waves. The language of being alive inhabits you completely.

You come home to a bag of ripe plums a friend left at your door. Eating one, you celebrate its wine-red flesh. One day you’ll be food for worms – maybe tomorrow, even – but for now you are here, in an astonishing world. Your whole being glows with wonder, almost child-like. You read a while, noticing the moon. You extinguish the light and close your eyes, drifting into sleep.

It’s strange, you think, how there’s no money in poetry, or bending spoons.