World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

I know it sounds incredibly precious, but these friends made me believe the mantra, “If one of us does well, we all do well.”

I think the blue heron is very suspicious. He’s so frozen, I feel bad for the frogs and fish that think he is just a bird statue.

Boom. Boom. You might think of a heartbeat—your own. A child’s. Someone else’s. Or some thing’s heart. And in that slowdown, you might think it’s a kind of love. And you’d be right.

The writer Brian Doyle said, “The world is still stuffed with astonishments beyond our wildest imagining—isn’t that the most alluring sentence ever?

Look around us—just about every hurt we see in the news is caused by a person’s lack of imagination, a lack of curiosity about their fellow human beings, a lack of wonder.