The Sense of Wonder

“After editing a friend’s writing today, which uses the essay “A Sense of Wonder” to think about defamiliarization as operative in her late partner’s landscape paintings in rural Japan, I’m in a dreamy haze. I volunteered at a food pantry this morning, which was simultaneously sweet and connective yet deeply alienating because of the religious overtones. These dual experiences are causing me to reflect on the distance between perceptual worlds: a sense of alienation that can occur at the very time one is striving for connection in physical reality with humans while perhaps feeling more connected among non-human beings, objects, and thoughts. Which is all to say that if you “sometimes see the world as a distant, almost cinematic reality,” perhaps it is time to return to the Rachel Carson essay, “A Sense of Wonder.” If you feel like an alien being among humans, as I often do, my recommendation is that perhaps you will find some comfort in the polyvalent clouds of multispecies worlds. Spaces that set up room for sensory experiences that are not domesticated or circumscribed by anthropocentric hierarchies.  Something infinite, which is life. Image: here's a Vogue Portugal shoot inspired by Juno Birch and a caterpillar eating parsley in a garden that I sometimes tend.”