I shall open my eyes and ears.
Once every day I shall simply stare
at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person.
I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are.
I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what C.S. Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic” existence.
~Clyde Kilby in “Amazed in the Ordinary”

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.

~Abraham Joshua Heschel

An open heart is alive to wonder, to the sheer marvel of “isness.”
It is remarkable that the world is,
that we are here,
that we can experience it.
This world is not ordinary.
Indeed, what is remarkable is that
it could ever look ordinary to us.

An open heart knows “radical amazement.”
An open heart and gratitude go together.
We can feel this in our bodies.
In the moments in my life
when I have been most grateful,
I have felt a swelling,
almost a bursting in my chest.
~Marcus Borg from The Heart of Christianity

Much of the time I sleep-walk through each day, oblivious, as if in dense fog with unseeing wide-open eyes.

Especially if I’m rushing from here to there, I sense time slowing: I stumble through the days, the path appears indiscernible, my future uncertain, my purpose elusive.

How to stay awake and aware of the radical amazement of each moment given to me?

When I’m simply glad, everything becomes more vivid — the sounds of geese flying overhead, the smell of the farm, the layers of a foggy landscape, the taste of an autumn apple right from the tree, the string of fog-drop pearls on a spider web, the necessity and intensity of every breath, my purpose to be witness.

So wake me to be amazed anew -please- to see all that is around me. I want to chew on it again and again, simply savoring and simply glad.