The other day, I was taking my 3-year-old son Ehan for a walk in a park. Gazing at his curiosity is my biggest fulfilling pleasure these days. Do you remember what it felt like to be a child, newly arrived in this strange and miraculous world? When every tiny thing seemed invested with magic and mystery? The way a simple dandelion puff could become a vessel for impossible wishes carried off by the wind. Or how an ordinary cardboard box could instantly transform into a spaceship, time machine or magical castle simply through the alchemy of your imaginings? As children, we existed in a state of perpetual awe, our senses constantly flooded with the pure rapture of being alive. The velvety texture of a rose petal, the delicious explosion of sweetness from a berry plucked straight off the vine, the kaleidoscope of colors splashed across a sunset sky – all of it was a grand carnival for our eager awareness to drink in.
In those early years, the universe felt wide as the sky, brimming with sublime possibilities and laced through with astonishment at every turn. We viewed the world through a lens of radical presence, utterly consumed by the magnificence of now in a way that alienated us from no aspect of the experience arising. Then, inevitably, we began growing up. Somehow, despite our parents’ and teachers’ best efforts, the world started getting smaller. The magical thinking that had once caused us to see tooth fairies and snipes in the garden gave way to the concrete, rational mind. The inherent mystery and divinity of all life became obscured by the endless looping of our conceptual stories about it all. Slowly, modern society’s trance of disenchantment sedated our childlike perception of reality as a living wonderland.
The bureaucratic, consumerist mindset deadened our senses and walled us off from the profound truth that we are in fact surrounded by absolute miracles at every turn. The very air we breathe, the astonishing natural intelligences collaborating within every breath to sustain our life force, became just “air” – something so rudimentarily taken for granted that we lost all cognizance of its staggering prosaicness. Our flesh, knitted together by trillions of cells cooperating in unfathomably complex biological symbioses, became a mere object of critique and judgment in the mirror rather than a seamless embodiment of the sacred cosmic choreographies that risened us into manifestation.
Even the stars twinkling in their grand galactic vaultings, the dizzying mysteries of spacetime and dark energy, became just twinkling lights in a vacant sky – no longer an abyssal ocean of wisdom and igniting forces whose secret languages our souls were forged to one day remember. Yet that bright, unarmored gaze we once turned upon this world with pure astonishment never truly goes away, no matter how many layers of jadedness and desensitization accrete upon it. No, it remains there in our secret hearts, pulsating insistently like a tiny seed awaiting the chance to thrust itself outward into a blossoming of rapture rekindled. All it takes is the willingness to pause, set down our catalogues of assumptions for just one powerful moment, and breathe our perception back into that primordial spaciousness. To return to seeing all of life not as a series of inert facts, but as an endless unfolding of miracles and total hospitable magic, no matter which way we happen to turn our newly untamed eyes.