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Wonder and Scale: Please Discuss
For many people, "sense of wonder" and nature intersect in the realms of grandeur and majesty (mountain peaks, huge waterfalls, volcanos, dramatic canyons). Many also find wonder in the bizarre and exotic. These things, though, are not human scale, and not part of our daily lives.
However, since wonder leads to valuing, cherishing, appreciating, and since it's ecologically desirable to have us v, c, & a nature wherever we find it, this argues for developing a sense of wonder that's as broad as possible, encompassing also the human-scale and the micro-scale. And this in turn argues for immersing children in nature, because children can so readily learn to experience wonder in the ordinary.
As example we have this passage from Robin Wall Kimmerer, from her book Gathering Moss:
So, then, for children it's not so hard. How, though, can busy (and sometimes cynical) adults expand their sense of wonder in nature, such that the daily, the mundane, can qualify, and not just those landscapes that really capture their attention?
However, since wonder leads to valuing, cherishing, appreciating, and since it's ecologically desirable to have us v, c, & a nature wherever we find it, this argues for developing a sense of wonder that's as broad as possible, encompassing also the human-scale and the micro-scale. And this in turn argues for immersing children in nature, because children can so readily learn to experience wonder in the ordinary.
As example we have this passage from Robin Wall Kimmerer, from her book Gathering Moss:
Miss Hopkins was too wise a teacher to try and hold back the excitement of five-year-olds on the occasion of the first snow, and out we went. In boots and mittens, we gathered around her in the soft swirl of white. From the deep coat of her pocket she took a magnifying glass. I'll never forget my first look at snowflakes through that lens, spangling the wooly sleeve of her navy blue coat like stars in a midnight sky. Magnified tenfold, the complexity and detail of a single snowflake took me completely by surprise. How could something as small and ordinary as snow be so perfectly beautiful? I couldn't stop looking. Even now, I remember the sense of possibility, of mystery that accompanied that first glimpse. For the first time, but not the last, I had the sense that there was more to the world than immediately met the eye. I looked out at the snow falling softly on the branches and rooftops with a new understanding, that every drift was made up of a universe of starry crystals. I was dazzled by what seemed a secret knowledge of snow. The lens and the snowflake were an awakening, the beginning of seeing. It's the time when I first had an inkling that the already gorgeous world becomes even more beautiful the closer you look.
So, then, for children it's not so hard. How, though, can busy (and sometimes cynical) adults expand their sense of wonder in nature, such that the daily, the mundane, can qualify, and not just those landscapes that really capture their attention?