Notes From the Pathway of Wonder and Awe - The Doorway of Wonder
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Each month, these Notes accompany our Wild Wisdom Monthly Practice, deepening our perception and understanding of our current theme through stories, reflections and experiences from my own life.
This month our practice is The Doorway of Wonder. In these Notes, I’m exploring how we keep our relationship with wonder alive — and what we will leave for those who come after us.
What wonder tales will we leave behind?
As we've moved through our practice this month, I have been thinking about how moments of wonder stop us in our tracks, shift our perception, open a door and sometimes carry us across a threshold before we've even had time to think about it.
How do we keep our relationship with wonder alive? Not only for ourselves, but for our descendants.
Wonder is all around us: an unfurling fern, a bee dusted with pollen, an acorn sitting perfectly in its little cap, a snail carrying its home on its back, a tree taking root in a crack in a rock, the last gold of sunset.
Paying attention is a sacred act. It deepens our relationship with wonder and our appreciation of the extraordinary in the everyday.
When we cultivate the art of paying attention, beauty and wonder have an open invitation into our lives.
And then there is the wonder of time.
Not simply the time measured by clocks and calendars, but Earth time. The movement of the seasons. The influence of the waxing and waning Moon. The tides. Migration. Flowering and fruiting. Birth, growth, death, decay and regeneration.
For our ancestors, these rhythms were part of everyday life. The ground was prepared. Seeds were planted. Crops were tended. Animals were cared for. The harvest came in. Food was stored. Winter approached.
Living within these cycles, people found meaning and wonder. They made beauty. They told stories. They recognised the presence of spirit and of something greater than themselves at work.
In the Northern Hemisphere, we are moving towards the final harvest and the time of the ancestors. In my tradition, this is a time rich with old rituals born from reverence for the living world.
In Ireland, intricate harvest knots were woven from straw, worn in the hair or pinned to clothing and exchanged as tokens of affection.
And then came the final sheaf. The Cailleach.
During the grain harvest in Ireland and Scotland, the final sheaf held particular significance. Known as the Cailleach [KOIL-yakh], it was woven into a small figure representing the ancient wise woman herself — creatrix and shaper of the land.
She was treated with great respect and given a special place in the home through the dark winter months, carrying the spirit of the harvest from one season to the next — and with it the promise that winter would eventually give way to spring.
That last sheaf, the Cailleach, was regarded as powerful and beneficial for livestock health, household luck and protection. Some stories tell of her being offered to the first cow to calve, after being scorched over the fire.
I love that. Something held sacred through the darkness of winter, offered as medicine for wellbeing and the abundance to come.
My ancestors kept their relationship with wonder alive through stories. They told wonder tales where ordinary life and the marvellous existed side by side. Someone set out on a journey. A stranger appeared. An animal showed the way. A difficult task had to be faced. A threshold was crossed. The impossible became possible.
Wonder tales carry us into other realms, through the known and the unknown. They open us to different ways of seeing and understanding the world, drawing on imagination, intuition and ancestral wisdom to expand our sense of what is possible and help us find our way.
Recently, a tiny orphaned wallaby came into my care.
It was 2am on a wild, windy night. The bright moon rode high in the sky, illuminating the road ahead. The men were tired. They had been out on an emergency call. Eager to get home to their warm beds, they decided to take the back roads to the depot.
“Hey! Stop the truck. Look there — let's check what that is.”
One of the men carefully approached the lifeless body. Trained in rescues of all kinds, they knew to check in case an animal was injured and needed help. As Jack approached the wallaby, obviously hit by a car, two black eyes shone in the beam of his torch.
A tiny joey stood dazed beside her mother.
Moving slowly, Jack took a towel from the back of the truck, scooped the joey into it and held her close.
“Pete takes in these guys, he's just up the road. Let's go and knock on his door.”
Only a few hours later, Pete messaged me. We met at the vet, where I took her in to be checked and hydrated.
Her name is Nettle.
There were no magical kingdoms. No enchanted forests. But there was a dark country road illuminated in the moonlight, a tiny being who had just lost her mother and the safety of her pouch, and people who chose to care.
The stories we tell about life shape our relationship with it.
So, what kind of ancestors are we becoming?
We carry stories, knowledge and ways of being passed down through generations, reaching back to people whose names have long been forgotten. Our ancestors were taking care of a future they would never see. They were taking care of us. Now it is our turn. We are already shaping what others will inherit.
The stories we pass on can shape how our descendants perceive the world — a river as a living being, a mountain as sacred rather than something to be mined, a forest as a living community rather than simply timber. They can also keep alive a wider sense of reality — one that leaves room for mystery, intuition, imagination and the possibility that there is more to life than the world we can see.
We are living at an extraordinary moment in time, with access to myriad stories, spiritual traditions, science and ways of knowing — so many different ways to see and understand the world.
There is a mysterious holiness in what is still to be born — in what future generations might imagine, discover and bring into the world through their relationship with wonder.
I have witnessed the threshold between life and death many times while caring for wildlife, and experienced it intimately through the loss of those I have loved and cared for. I am deeply aware of the preciousness and fragility of life. One moment there is life force, then it’s gone, like a candle flame being snuffed out.
Endings, beginnings and fleeting encounters are part of the wonder of being alive. The sun and moon rise and set. The season turns. The animal runs across the field and disappears into the trees.
Earth time holds all of it. So, what will we do with the time we have been given?
When we pay attention, we find meaning in the everyday. We make beauty from our daily rituals and encounters with the natural world. We care for what crosses our path. We tell the stories that matter to us.
We inherited a world filled with stories, mystery, beauty, knowledge and ways of understanding that reach back beyond memory. The footprints of those who came before us light the way into the unknown. Ours can do the same.
Through the stories we tell, we can pass on ways of seeing and relating to one another and to the Earth. Our wonder tales can carry respect, love, wonder and awe into lives we will never know.
What will we add to their inheritance? What will our stories show them is worth caring for?
What relationship with wonder can we pass on?
What wonder tales will we leave behind?
Much love
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