It was a simple thing. For a few months, the snail would inch across my front porch, and then up my front door. And every morning, I would open the door and see him waiting, his vesicular eyes twitching in the early morning breeze. I would see the silver lining he drew across my porch and up the door.

It was that silver lining, the literal silver lining in front of me day after day, that was the oomph I needed to persist through a deep and excruciating betrayal that upended my life. If the snail could draw his silver lining every day, couldn’t I? It might seem too simple—but isn’t it the simple things that save us?

The philosopher Simone Weil wrote, “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” And so it was with the snail—as I paid attention to the curve of his shell, his daily path, his unconcerned morning on my door—he became a prayer, an anchor of hope.

So many of us could use an anchor of hope right now. There is something shifting in the air around us. The purpose of Constant Wonder to find awe and wonder in all nature—human or wild, vast or small, feels specifically necessary. Vital, even.

In “The Science of Awe,” Summer Allen pointed out something that those of us who cultivate a rich spiritual life already know: “Awe experiences are self-transcendent. They shift our attention away from ourselves, make us feel like we are part of something greater than ourselves, and make us more generous toward others.”
Cultivating awe and wonder isn’t trivial, it’s what pulls our inward attention outward. It moves us beyond words. It is the thing that connects us to each other and to the earth.

Mary Oliver wrote,

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Constant Wonder is the place where I get to pay attention to the world around me, and where I get to tell you and your friends across the world what marvels are beneath our feet and in the people around us. If I do it right, then you feel awe and wonder right alongside me. As I work to draw silver linings bright enough for you to see and feel, I hope to bring people together in a unison hope. In this place, we work to make holy ground. I’m glad to have you along.

What we do requires a lot of rhetorical precision—I get pretty nervous about it, truthfully. I often feel that the way I use language isn’t quite good enough.

When applying for this job, I was asked to write a fun fact sheet about myself. The list is lost now somewhere in the depths of digital files, but I remember the last thing I wrote on that sheet was something like this:

There are moments where I realize that no matter how eloquently I speak, there is no possible way to make someone realize my true feelings. It’s incredibly maddening: at the same time, it’s kind of beautiful that I can possess such wonderfully complex and deep emotions. I feel I am constantly trying to get as close as I can to expressing myself perfectly—with no end in sight.

As part of the Constant Wonder team, I am regularly asked to identify moments where I feel the emotion and virtue of awe. Without fail, I struggle to describe these moments of awe in words.

I try to get close, though.

Constant Wonder is a space where we’re all trying to get as close as we can to conveying in words those emotions and experiences we can’t actually describe—like the feeling you get when you look at the stars and you feel really small and really big at the same time or the feeling as you look up at the vast mountainous landscape around and try your best to focus on every little detail speckled upon it or even the feeling when you look out and think about how many other people are doing the exact same thing at the exact same time.

We are trying to open the listener’s eyes to the unprecedented beauty—the wonder—that is accessed when we open our hearts to the world around us.

And what I’ve learned is that it’s not necessarily my fault that words aren’t sufficient to convey what I’m feeling. The world just has too many fascinating, transcendent facets that can’t be channeled through language.

So maybe I shouldn’t be ashamed when I feel as though my words fail. I guess that it’s simply just an indication of how wonderful the world is…

— Jenna McMartin is an emeritus Assistant Producer for Constant Wonder.

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That probably brings to mind The Big Four, the common divisions used in normal conversation. But Japan splits things up even further—this acknowledges that snow is still evaporating in early spring, and that late spring must first shift into something syrupy and warm before stepping aside for the tsuyu rains. In this 24-part calendar, each season lasts just over two weeks.

The aforementioned Bug Seasons more closely adhere to this fast-changing timeline: in early June, there are a solid two weeks when thumbnail-sized ants invade bathtubs, and then nature makes up for that mildly unpleasant shock by sending pale green luna moths. Later, an entire field dances with sunset-colored dragonflies that will land on your finger if you're lucky, and in late July come the long-winged beige creatures with swiveling heads and pointy mandibles.

At this point, the bug haters are probably squirming in their seats. After this year, I also have to concede that The Season In Which I Got Fifty-One Bites was not fun. It was interesting, though. Nothing is more exciting than finding new critters, and after enough time passes, your friends actually begin to bring the critters to you, because they don't care for insects but know you do.

Fascination and curiosity spread. They multiply.

And we were only looking carefully at the bugs! We could read the world in an entirely different way if we chose to observe the trees, or the wildflowers, or the shapes of the clouds, or what outfit our neighbor wore each morning when walking their dog.

In that sense, the world is a thousand-faceted jewel; each turn revealing a new collection of curiosities. Some people spend an entire lifetime examining one facet and continually find it delightful, while others turn the gem over in their hands and enjoy a new refraction of light each week.

This is what having constant wonder means. It means tilting that jewel until something flashes and strikes your attention; there is an endless stream of discoveries to be made, and many small joys to yet be shared.

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That opportunity arose over a decade later, as I was starting middle school. My aunt was cleaning out her garage, found the violin her daughter quit playing, and passed it along to me.

I joined a beginning orchestra and plucked and screeched my way into a passion, just like the kid on the TV. Practicing was the only thing I wanted to do, Disney songs and simplified classical themes, feeling the wood humming under my chin and the strings sliding beneath my fingers. But my very favorite part was when I could sit in class and play, feet firmly planted, eyes locked on the conductor.

The basses sent this beautiful vibration through the linoleum and into my legs, where I imagined my bones sharing that sympathetic frequency. In that room, I was part of the music, a limb of some great creature, and a member of an incredibly tightly-knit community.

This love only intensified as I gained proficiency and joined a more advanced group. Now, we moved in sync, breathing as one and swaying together to our music. Just after winter break, our conductor passed out a new piece to the group. It was called Jupiter: the Bringer of Jollity, an excerpt from a much larger classical suite inspired by the planets. Jupiter was a slow, beautiful, celestial theme that required absolute precision and perfect tone, but when we succeeded I felt like I was flying. My violin, my hands, my mind weren’t my own anymore.

It brought me absolute peace and comfort, even as quarantine separated us all. In my darkest moments, I have turned to that piece of music to remember that I am part of something so much larger than myself.

Constant Wonder is a unique podcast in the way it gives that exact same reminder. It invites you to pause, zoom out, and realize that we live in a vast and wonderful world full of beauty and peace. You just need to look for that beauty, and it will gather to you.

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Photo by Manuel Nägeli on Unsplash