Wonder

Having a sense of wonder is of vital importance to me. I would live by the sea if I could just to watch the waves crashing and the shoreline changing every day with the rhythm of the moon. I live in the hills in south east Melbourne, on Wurendjeri land, where we have an abundance of rain and the trees are spectacular. Their colours change with the seasons and sometimes simply with the light. I have seen gum tree leaves painted hot pink reflecting the sunset. I am often left in absolute wonder at the beauty of it all.

When I was a child I wondered about fairies and spent a lot of time looking for them. I looked for them everywhere. I would sometimes catch glimpses out of the corner of my eye. I spent hours looking for fairy rings in our garden and in the nearby bluebell forest. Sometimes my dad would leave a ring of grass un-mown, to give the fairies somewhere to dance and my little heart would be full of joy.

Do you experience coincidences you can’t explain? Conversations that trip over something someone said or something you read. Do you wonder about them? I do. It seems to happen to me a lot.

Sometimes it’s after I have a deep philosophical conversation with my husband, Glyn, over coffee. We often discuss the nature of all things. The state of the world, the beauty surrounding us, the nature of trees, the way everything seems to be connected. We cover a lot and we are not afraid to go deep. Later, driving somewhere, we will be listening to a podcast or I will read out an article I’ve come across and it turns out to be exactly what we were talking about earlier.

I wish I’d written down all the times it has happened. The most recent was a simple conversation with my son on the phone. He was telling me about a new shop that sold the most amazing oysters and how he had cooked them in his new barbecue. That night, my cousin in the UK, shared a picture on her socials of a plate of oysters Kilpatrick.

I mean… weird right?

Recently, Glyn and I were driving to Mt Martha, and we somehow got onto the topic of therapy and how it was not something anyone spoke about when we were young. We talked about shell shock, post traumatic shock from the war. I got on my high horse about how I think people tend to overuse the word ‘trauma’ these days, or they say they have PTS over the bakery running out of bagels. I banged on about how it diminishes the reality of post traumatic shock for people who have experienced ‘real’ trauma like shell shock from the war. Later that day I read an article, on sub stack, which my daughter-in-law had commented on, where the writer was talking about how some people think unless trauma is shell shock from the war, it’s not real trauma.

Huh?

Another time, a preordered children’s book arrived and I read it. ‘Leaf Letters,’ written and illustrated by Lorena Carrington, published by Christmas Press. A delightful story about a young girl and her friend who find a buried tin (treasure) full of coded messages — I won’t spoil it for you with details, I recommend you read it. (and/or buy a copy for any young people you know) That night we watched a [rubbish] eighties private investigator show. Something we watch when there’s nothing decent on tv, which is most of the time. In this episode, the main character went to her old family home to dig up a treasure tin she and her best friend buried years ago.

What the?

A few days later I was thinking about a song I used to love and decided on the spur of the moment, to re-purchased the song on iTunes. The song was ‘Baby I’ve been watching you,’ by Max Merrit and the Meteors. Back in the day I used to play the track over and over. I lost the album when our housemate ‘took’ the album when he moved out, along with a lot of my other favourite albums. I thought he could be trusted, turns out he was an asshat. On the same day I bought the song, the [rubbish eighties] tv show used it as a dance number to end the show. Not a surprise for a show from the eighties but it just happened to be the same day I repurchased the same song by the same band from the same album.

There are so many more times this has happened to me. Too many to keep track of, let alone write about. It’s not like the algorithms listening in on our smartphones to our conversations or keeping tabs on our clicks, then sending adds on Instagram. It feels more like someone is listening in to my thoughts and conversations or reading my morning pages. It’s personal. That’s why I enjoy these ‘coincidences.’ I wonder what is going on and I wonder what on earth it all means. This wonder is a good thing. It reminds me I am connected to this wonderful universe and I have a theory about where it all comes from.

Most of my life I went to church, I don’t now, which is a long story. That doesn’t mean I have lost my faith. Sixty plus years of belief doesn’t evaporate overnight.

God is not a word a lot of people are comfortable with anymore. Including me. It smacks of empire, chauvinism, bigotry, inequality, even abuse and war. Humans over the centuries have managed to twist and warp Love itself. These days I prefer ‘the Divine’ which I think is a better way of describing the indescribable. I know its semantics but we need to call this presence something. Whatever you call this presence, this energy if you like, running through all things, ‘the Divine’ is constantly trying to get our attention. We may call it coincidence but I think it’s more than that. I believe we are all connected to everything. It’s not just the trees who are connected to one another. The message of love is being spoken all the time and it’s asking us to pay attention. Love is speaking and it speaks in the language of the soul.

I believe that’s why there are so many beautiful sunsets and how even rainy days can be lit up with bright rainbows and dark night skies can fill with irridencent colours of auroras. Why the clouds sometimes take our breath away. How the oceans and rivers can soothe and heal our hearts.

It’s even in those tiny moments of connection when our conversation is reflected in an old tv show, or a random podcast or a simple article we stumble across.

What did Roald Dahl say? ‘Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.’