Oh, and both of my grandson’s have relationship with “Luna”–and the stars and visible planets. With the younger of the two we just play and go for walks out on my daughter’s family’s land up in Washington. With the older of the two we speak about dreams together, and the idea of creation and a Creator/trix. With Rachel Carson I agree that: “If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder…he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.” This I do with both of my grandsons. Matthew, Today you ask us in our Queries for Contemplation: “Are you one of those adults who assist children to keep alive their inborn sense of wonder?” I believe I am one of those kind of adults. Photo by Huper by Joshua Earle on Unsplash. To read a transcript of Matthew Fox’s video teaching, click HERE.īanner Image: The wonder of transition. *See Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (NY HarperCollins: 1998).Īdapted from Matthew Fox, A Way To God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey, pp. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being.Īs prophets (who interfere and say ‘No!’) and as mystics (who celebrate wonder and say ‘Yes!’), Merton and Carson are brother and sister. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. Thomas Merton had this same sense when he writes:Ĭontemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. Carson knew nature’s role in keeping the Via Positiva alive. If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder…he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in. There are deep insights here for what eldership means and why it is so important to work-“without a why”-as Meister Eckhart tells us. These encounters were “based on having fun together rather than on teaching,” she informs us. By the time Roger was four years old, they continued their adventures in nature both in the calm and the storms, in daytime and at night times. “I think we felt the same spine-tingling response to the vast, roaring ocean and the wild night around us,” she testifies. The book begins with the story of her wrapping her 20 month old grand nephew Roger in a blanket and taking him down to the beach at night during a rain storm. Before her death, she wrote, “I want very much to do the Wonder book, that would be Heaven to achieve.” “We plan for it to be rather lavishly illustrated with the most beautiful photographs we can find some color and some black and white,” she told a friend. She had laid out plans for the book before she died. In the book version it is wonderfully buttressed with rich photographs of the richness and beauty of nature. It is called The Sense of Wonder and it is essentially an essay she wrote in 1956 in Woman’s Home Companion with the title, “Help Your Child to Wonder.”* Today, I want to carry on that synergetic friendship twixt Merton and Carson around the theme of another book by Carson, one that she did not finish before her untimely death in 1964 but that was published after she died. All three books were physical explanations of life, all drenched with miracle of what happens to life in and near the sea.Portrait of Rachel Carson. The Edge of the Sea (1955) brought Carson’s focus on the ecosystems of the eastern coast from Maine to Florida. It became an international best-seller, raised the consciousness of a generation, and made Rachel Carson the trusted public voice of science in America. A canny scholar working in government during World War II, Carson took advantage of the latest scientific material for her next book, The Sea Around Us (1951) which was nothing short of a biography of the sea. Her first book, Under the Sea-Wind (1941) was a gripping account of the interactions of a sea bird, a fish and an eel - who shared life in the open seas. She was always aware of the impact that humans had on the natural world. Fish and Wildlife Service in Washington, DC, primarily as a writer and editor. Born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, upstream from the industrial behemoth of Pittsburgh, she became a marine scientist working for the U.S. Carson was a student of nature, a born ecologist before that science was defined, and a writer who found that the natural world gave her something to write about.
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