The Wonder of Small Things

Poetry can help reveal the whisper of awe that lives so often in the smallest of things, in what daily things remain wondrous to us.
 

At a recent book launch event in Middlebury, Vermont for The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace & Renewal, a woman approached the table where I was sitting afterward. She held a copy splayed open for me to sign, but I could tell that something else was on her mind. As I’d read the poems from the anthology earlier, I often glanced her way to find her leaned back with eyes closed, absorbing the words as if they were hers alone to savor.

“I just have to say,” she almost whispered, lightly touching my arm. “These poems made me think of a moment I had the other day.”

She went on to tell me about her house nestled on several acres with a pristine view of surrounding mountains. How she stood there that afternoon, looking out, until a sense of awe came over her.

“I realized I’m just a visitor here,” she said. “We’re all just visitors on this planet that has been here for such a long time before us.”

I told her I was glad she had shared that. “I’m going to try and remember that,” I said.

Ever since beginning to assemble this collection of poems about everyday moments of wonder and awe, I have found more and more of my own, taking what I call “wonder walks” around our gardens, through trails in the woods. I stand before glowing-yellow black-eyed Susans or moss-covered, wide-trunked maples spared from loggers years ago, and it’s almost as if, as my eyes adjust to a deeper way of seeing, I am eventually able to make out the bumblebees, wasps, and pearl crescent butterflies gathered at each flower. I am able to see a small red eft crawling among the tiny fronds and sporophytes of moss.

There is a name for this kind of attentiveness to the so-called ordinary world. As Katherine May explains in her book, Enchantment: “Mircea Eliade coined the term hierophany to describe the way that the divine reveals itself to us, transforming the objects through which it works. When we make a tree or a stone or a wafer of bread the subject of our worshipful attention, we transform it into a hierophany, an object of the sacred.” As the poems gathered in The Wonder of Small Things all prove, we can turn almost anything into a source of awe, a sacrament, with the simple application of our close attention. In the hands of these poets, a grapefruit for breakfast, a blossoming tree in April, and a sprinkler slowly filling a bowl left in the yard all become things that open us to the renewing power of poetry combined with a fuller presence to the world around us.

If we are to survive and thrive, we must generate new narratives that do not dwell only in the failures of our species, or the very real climate crisis we face.

Ross Gay writes in his landmark book of essays, Inciting Joy: “What if wonder was the ground of our gathering?” Over the past year, as I faced the loss not only of my mother, but also of both my grandmothers—the three women who raised me—I held his words close, stealing hours to print out my favorite poems, spreading them on the floor to see how they all might fit together. As I read through poems about a sudden ice storm that transforms a California landscape, and the ways we can all access our own childhood capacities for tenderness and immersion, I see that one of my main intentions with this book was to seek out the wonder we now know heals us in very real ways. The renowned psychologist, Dacher Keltner, who studies human emotion and the search for meaning, explains in Awe: “Wonder, the mental state of openness, questioning, curiosity, and embracing mystery, arises out of experiences of awe.” His extensive studies in the field have proven that “people who feel even five minutes a day of everyday awe are more curious about art, music, poetry, new scientific discoveries, philosophy, and questions about life and death.”

Poets have always known this, and the best writing for me—the ground of my own gathering—shapes quieter moments of attention into whole worlds that can stay with us for the rest of our lives. I think of the opening lines, for instance, of Ted Kooser’s transcendent poem, “In Early April”: “A tree in blossom is a passing cloud/that floats from some warmer place/then slows and snows itself away.” With just a few words, Kooser forever alters how we see a tree in spring. After reading his poem, I know that I will never look at a blossoming apple or pear tree in quite the same way. Rita Dove’s “Horse and Tree” has a similar effect: “Everybody who’s anybody longs to be a tree/or ride one, hair blown to froth,” she begins. Instantly, we are thrown slightly off-kilter by this playful opening, these words for the awe we feel when we stop to consider the lives of other beings, including horses and trees. We can, of course, also find wonder in each other, in the everyday task, for example, that Li-Young Lee captures in his poem, “To Hold.” He recreates the scene of folding sheets with his wife as they take turns sharing dreams from the night before. He writes: “I’ll listen to her dream/and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling/more and more detail into the light/of a joint and fragile keeping.” Perhaps the practice of wonder, as Keltner points out, allows us to stay open to the mystery of our love for each other, knowing that every relationship is temporary, that at some point we will have to say goodbye to the people we love most in this world, and they will have to say goodbye to us. “So we’re dust,” Lee writes at the very beginning of his poem, knowing that every poem dwells “in the meantime” of this life on earth.

Some have asked me how I endured so much loss this past year, yet managed to stay productive, assembling this book during what could be described as the worst time of my life. I can only answer: poetry, writing, wonder. I felt lucky beyond reckoning that my daily work included gathering poems that returned me to my body, the land, and the ever-elusive present moment. The more time I spent with these poems, arranging and rearranging them, and corresponding with the people who made them, the more the richness of this world—in spite of its larger troubles and wars, in spite of my own personal struggles—became apparent to me. Moving small toads out of the road at night or swimming in the middle of a lake where a dragonfly lands on a floating pigeon feather, the simplest acts and sightings can help us tell better stories about our lives. As Krista Tippett has said recently: “We are fluent in the story of our time marked by catastrophe and dysfunction. That is real — but it’s not the whole story of us. There is also an ordinary and abundant unfolding of dignity and care and generosity, of social creativity and evolution and breakthrough. How to make that more vibrant, more visible, and more defining?”

Throughout each of the anthologies I’ve edited, I have tried to answer this question. I have assembled poems that return readers to a world held in quiet moments of grace, gratitude, kindness, hope, connection, and awe. Especially in The Wonder of Small Things, I have tried to show that the very real brokenness revealed to us in endless doses of news does not represent the entire story of us. If we are to survive and thrive, we must generate new narratives that do not dwell only in the failures of our species, or the very real climate crisis we face. Poetry can help reveal the whisper of awe that lives so often in the smallest of things, in what daily things remain wondrous to us.