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Hello! I thought to use this letter to casually suggest that you and I live a “day-to-day reality” built upon ineffable miraculousness. Perhaps that sounds hokey. Maybe you’re going, “Oh, come on Ethan…” and rolling your eyes right now. However, I say this with utmost seriousness. The remarkable truth is that the experience of being a human being on planet Earth is so crazy (and often scary to us beings with temporary bodies and the cognitive ability to grasp this situation) that we repress “our vision of the primary miraculousness of creation” so that we can function within it. We are walking among, breathing in, and so utterly surrounded by the miraculousness and have been for so long now that we can hardly notice it anymore. I suspect this to be the “water” in David Foster Wallace’s famous “This is Water” graduation speech, particularly because of this line at its crescendo: “If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.” Since finishing Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death this October, I’ve been quietly pressing my awareness against the mundane — while driving the same old stretch of highway, shooting real estate photography, and amid cross country flights in the middle seat. Every one of these experiences — in itself — is utterly remarkable. A stacking of decades of breakthroughs by ingenious inventors and engineers, hundreds of eurekas piled atop one another to make what once could have only been magic, now mundane. When we do any of these things for the first time, they’re transcendently awesome. When cars and cameras and planes were invented, people understood the sheer incredulousness of what was happening. However, as we get further from our first interactions with them (or, as a culture, get used to seeing things like pressurized tubes full of people flying across the sky constantly) we lose sight of the miracle of these things. But even more miraculous than miracles of the modern day is the “primary miraculousness.” Things like being alive, breathing air, or grasping the fact that every bit of you has been around more or less forever and that all but the least complex atoms that compose you were cooked into existence in the nuclear heart of a star. We naturally reduce our awareness for the familiar, for things we have already seen and know, so that we can apply our awareness to new and more pressing things. This great strategy for being a capable being, but the tradeoff is that we lose that “childlike” wonder, which is really just basic apprehension of the miraculousness of what is, a form of sight we become hardly capable of as adults. However, I posit that we can regain this “childlike” wonder, at least to some degree, simply by deliberately looking for the miraculousness. By pausing a few times a day to dig the absurdity of the situation, remembering your place in space, or realizing that one of the things those atoms cooked into existence in stars have somehow become is the old lady in front of you holding up the checkout line. We are somehow here, and that alone, is the most miraculous of miracles. Whoo!!! With love & stoke, Ethan P.S. WONDER WANDER 2021 begins in but three days and we are going straight for the wonder of being among the red rocks of southern Utah! A shout out to all y’all soon to convene to honor the awe, swap the unique goodnesses of our lives, and share the particular awarenesses have been graced with!
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