It was not merely a world full of miracles it was a miraculous world.

What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. Chesterton at seventeenĪ century after Baudelaire observed that “genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will,” and a generation before Dylan Thomas insisted that “children in wonder watching the stars, is the aim and the end,” Chesterton looks back on his early life and how it fomented the animating ethos of his later life as a literary artist and thinker: Chesterton (May 29, 1874–June 14, 1936) - philosopher, impassioned early eugenics opponent, prolific author of several dozen books, several hundred poems and short stories, and several thousand essays - from The Autobiography of G.K. How to awaken to this miraculousness and begin to make meaning is, of course, the great creative challenge of life.Īll of this - the dandelion, the insistence on wonder as the sieve for meaning - reminded me of a some passages by G.K. The recognition of this unbidden miracle of chance is the fundamental matter of meaning - the great awakening from the myth. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy)Īnd yet, somehow, against the staggering cosmic odds otherwise, we get to experience this sky, these trees, these colors, these loves we live. These are the thoughts coursing through this temporary constellation of consciousness as I pause at the lush mid-June dandelion at the foot of the hill on my morning run - the dandelion, now a fiesta of green where a season ago the small sun of its bloom had been, then the ethereal orb of its seeds, now long dispersed the dandelion, existing for no better reason than do I, than do you - and no worse - by the same laws of physics beyond meaning: these clauses of exquisite precision punctuated by chance. From its particular vantage point, there will be no more meaning, for the point itself will have dissolved - there will only be other humans left, making meaning of their own lives, including any meaning they might make of the residue of yours. When you die - when these organized atoms that shimmer with fascination and feeling - disband into disorder to become unfeeling stardust once more, everything that filled your particular mind and its rosary of days with meaning will be gone too. But unlike the laws of physics - which predate us and will postdate us and made us - meaning only exists in this brief interlude of consciousness between chaos and chaos, the interlude we call life. There is a myth we live with, the myth of finding the meaning of life - as if meaning were an undiscovered law of physics.

The Party by Sergio Ruzzier