Wonder

How did you cultivate a sense of wonder...
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Wonder is my blackberry vine.  Can someone rent me some goats?

Okay, so only someone who lives in the Pacific Northwest will get that particular joke.  The analogy is apt anyway.  See, I've struggled with this prompt.  I've stared at it, and stared at it, and stared some more, trying to figure out what to say.

I've never had to "cultivate" wonder in myself.  I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to need to do so.  I am constantly, perpetually, curious and awed about the world and just about everything in it.  Even the things I dislike strong enough to use the word "hate" about.  I'm just driven to want to know, to understand, things.  And I find all that more fascinating than anything fictional or made up.

Maybe I should have been a scientist.  But I've always found hard science too limiting.  It requires too much focus.  There's simply no room for generalism and I'm definitely a generalist.  Jack of all trades, master of none.

Just this past weekend, driving up to YAL (yet another lake) to explore, I tried my hand at practicing botany, geology, meteorology, climatology, hydrology, topology... Everything I said seemed to start with "Oh wow, what's that?" or "Oh, how pretty, I wonder how..." as I'd wander in for a closer look.  

The weekend before, I spent some unknown amount of time standing on a beach along a raging white water river, just looking at the rocks.  Staring at the patterns and colors in them, trying to figure out how exactly they got that way, what minerals caused what effect, whether they were volcanic or sedimentary.

The weekend before that, I stood at the bottom of a glacial valley, on the shores of a lake so calm it mirrored the mountains on either side of it, and watched steam plumes from the vents of an active volcano.  Just awed by the fact that I was standing there, so seemingly insignificant in comparison to this living mountain that hadn't erupted in millennia.  

Even people, as much as they often infuriate me, fascinate me.  Sociology, psychology, anthropology.  Language, especially, I love learning about.  How it affects culture, and how culture affects it in return.

Life, and death as well, hold so much to wonder about.  I just can't seem to stop poking at any of it.

But... It has it's downside.  I often get lost in my computer screen, drowning my curiosity in google searches and wiki articles.  Doing that thing where you start out wanting to know about one specific subject, but you see a link to something else interesting, which links to something else interesting, which links to something else... And before you know it, hours have gone by.  Your simple question of "Has Estonia adopted the Euro yet?" has turned into a winding journey that twisted and turned it's way through the web and left you staring at a research paper about the long term effects of hand sanitizer on lab rats.