Memories of the Heart Blog

I was reading Seth Godin’s blog a couple of weeks ago and he made me think, as he so often does. Seth Godin blogs about business ideas and is a well-known author and he’s terrific. In the blog post, his first sentences were, “I stumbled on a great typo last night. ‘Staff in the lobby were wondering around…’” Seth went on to do what he does best, relate it to business, but I started thinking about the things I’ve seen and done lately that caused me to feel a sense of wonder.

A few weeks ago I was out with my grandchildren and stopped to feed some ducks at a small lake. Seagulls live at the lake too and they were eating bread along with the ducks. Pretty soon the seagulls did something I’d never seen before. They started hovering in front of my face and catching the bread I threw in midair. They were so close I could have reached out and touched them. (Luckily I’m finally over the awfulness of the movie The Birds. I only felt a little nervous about running out of bread once.) For a short while the cute, hungry little ducks in front of me were forgotten.

Last week my grandchildren and I visited a toy store that carries all wooden toys. Very unusual. The staff invites kids to come in and play and that’s just what my grandson did. He tried everything out that was at his eye level and I could see a sense of wonder in the expressions on his face. Pretty soon I was playing with the toys also and trying to decide if playing at cooking with wooden pots and pans would work better than not cooking at all, which is  my normal state of affairs.

Another recent wondrous thing – when we were at Wild Animal Park I got to see a lion up close and hear him roar. Loudly and scarily. King of the jungle. Leader of the pack. For a few seconds I had a mental picture of what it would be like to face a lion in the jungle. A very primal feeling. Lions are impressive and large and appear to be quite strong, and perhaps not always friendly. In case of a contest, I’m going to pretty much put my money on the lion.

These are just some of my experiences. My granddaughter thinks there is nothing more wonderful and incredible than Johnny Depp. I can understand that. She cried when he came on the screen in Alice of Wonderland. It was just all too much.

I’ve decided I’d like to have what I’m going to call a carousel state of consciousness. This will mean meeting the world with the same fascination that I feel when I’m riding a galloping horse on a carousel (which I also did last week). This may be tougher than I think. We’ll see how I do. That feeling is pretty easy to pull off when I’m gazing at a charming flower or a beautiful sunset, but we’ll really know what I can muster up when I’m at the grocery store, tired, with no makeup on and the delightful little bird on my car decides to poop.