Thursday, November 5, 2026
Hope you enjoyed the Halloween Eve with your family and friends. The website is finally fixed and I can continue to post short pieces about mindfulness, meditation, reading, walking, and journaling.
We begin a new month today: Mindfulness, and Awe, Wonder, Delight. For this eleventh month I’ll write about my experiences in nature mostly National Parks, experiencing art, and looking at sacred images.
Awe, Wonder and Delight are sacred emotions that kindle spiritual delight, tenderness, and kindness. Ancient Hindu texts teach that within us there is an innate force of joyful wonder, but we must create outer circumstances for it to sprout and surface. This may happen when we face an adversity or when we are midst beauty of nature such as the rays of setting sun filtering through spring foliage making the shadows dance.
Wonder is a heightened state of awareness that is triggered when something unexpected happens that disorients yet delights us. It is present in us all the time but remains dormant until something enters our consciousness to part the mental clouds and reveal it.
We have the power to turn each moment into a wondrous moment. There is no reason to wait for a stunning natural landscape to stir the feelings of wonder and awe. They are present in this very moment. For instance, pay attention how you are reading what I wrote a few days ago. You are reading these words and comprehending the images that I imagined and translated in words. I arranged them in sentences that are now creating meaningful images in your mind. If this is not wonderous, then what is?
Another example. Imagine how we transmute different kinds of raw ingredients vegetables, meats, spices, oils by boiling, searing, baking, grilling, frying into gourmet dishes. This simple marvel has become a jaded action because we perform it repeatedly. But isn’t it awesome? Isn’t it a wonder that it happens every day in our lives?
Many such acts such as our comprehension of language or preparing dishes with raw ingredients get jaded because we do not focus fully on their miracle. The more aware and attentive we are of our action and our surroundings, the more delight we’d feel in our day to day living. This awe, wonder and delight is in each and every thing we think, say or do. Think about the clothes you are wearing? The house you are living in? The family you have created? And what they were before they turned into the wearables, the house, the family members
Potent moments of awe, wonder and delight are subtle, fleeting. They appear when attention, awareness and imagination come together. One moment the feeling is there, the next moment it is gone. But when we are curious and mentally open, when we are bewildered and hold things in high regard, we become conscious of our true essence, we become aware of our consciousness that experiences awe, wonder and delight and realize how awe-some the universe truly is.