look, a little wonder(ing).

Earlier this year I listened to this conversation between Krista Tippett and Dacher Keltner about the science of awe. Very briefly, the main idea being—

”after 20 years, we have the answer to the perennial question: how to live a good life? And the answer is: to find awe.

…And after a research study (over 2,600 narratives in 20 languages), the first surprise was: it’s other people around us — everyday people — who bring us awe, and what we called moral beauty...kindness, courage, overcoming obstacles. Just time and time again the most common source of awe is other people.”

I took Keltner’s advice: to take even just a few minutes every day to walk around the block, to look out and find small moments of awe in the world around me. And sure enough, it took root quickly, sending ripples of noticing goodness through my days.

I was so moved that I sent it around to a few friends in that evangelically zealous way you do with a new book or song, not expecting anything back.

But instead, more awe blossomed: for weeks after people started sending me moments of awe they encountered in their daily life. 

From there, that little seed—as seeds often do—grew into something beautiful and unexpectedly expansive.

So born here today is a sometimes dispatch I’ll be writing, putting together moments of awe in words and pictures. 

If (& only if) it sparks some awe for you, please feel free to follow along with our instagram here and by subscribing here.

And last--and truly anything but least--if the wonder strikes, feel free to share it. Share it with me here through the site, or here on instagram where I'm collecting all the shared moments, share the conversation with someone you think needs a reminder to notice the awe in their life. 

In what little I know, wonder begets wonder, awe begets awe, and most of all sharing begets sharing--and so I've decided to forgive myself the repetition and offer, in service of giving others the permission to share, too. Because really, what else can we, any of us, do. 

In great love & wonder,

corey

All of my life, my mother collected heart shaped things. Stones, shells, flecks of paint, bark, rust. My father, for years—ever a man of habit—bought her a heart-shaped something from a store, no longer there, called The Kitchen Table. 

Whenever I was away from home, often without realizing it, I was looking for them too. Something to bring back to her, to include her in, to press into her palm. 

She and I got our first tattoos together—of course, a heart inside a heart—mine on my ribs, forever tucked under my arm, and hers right there in her palm. So wherever we are, I’m holding your heart, she said.

I remember laughing when a dear friend in high school said to me once—in the charming, matter-of-fact way only she could—well you know, the heart is my favorite shape. Maybe I’d laughed a little because hearts can feel schmaltzy, the way we’ve seen them splashed across ad campaigns for chocolates or diamonds or promises of a fantastical certainty that felt alarmingly flimsy to stand up to the painful impermanence of life on earth. But mostly, I think, I had laughed because I hadn’t ever thought about choosing a Favorite Shape the way one might a Favorite Color or Book or Song, but looking back now, a favorite shape made maybe more sense than any other favorite we claim by labeling—not so much a favorite finite thing, but container that could be filled, embellished, colored in anew every time. A Favorite that could grow with you. 

Fanta laughed when she shared that she felt a little silly having chosen a moment of awe that was just noticing the chicken nugget she was about to eat was heart-shaped, that maybe she had understood the prompt incorrectly. But what could be more appropriate? Being called in, for just exactly that present moment, to notice—to notice that familiar outline of something akin to love, to notice that small detail long enough to pause in the rush of a business-as-usual day, to notice the container of you and your ability to love growing, showing up in places you weren’t even looking—a stone, a leaf, the soft foam of a cold beer on the wall of a pint glass in London, like my friend Jill sent over…even a chicken nugget.

We hunted the yard for hearts and when there weren’t enough to show our affection, we made our own. Because we love you, wrote my brilliant friend Jeanie, the mother of my little found family. After years scouring the earth for heart shaped things for someone I loved, the gesture returned felt not only like a perfect moment of everyday awe but one also of wholeness. Of being connected to something larger. Of returning home, the same and somehow more than before. 

The heart search continues. And, when you come back from the hunt empty-handed—because sometimes you will—you make your own. A space to fill, to plant, to notice. 

I am bewildered here, again as always, with how much a word can mean, how much a heart can hold. Here, in a clump of cells, in a small string of four letters, infinite meanings, infinite possibilities.

So perhaps, after all, the best containers we have to hold all that infinite, are the ones we find and make our own.