Wonder

(The storage room.  Washington, D.C.)

Wonder begins with the element of surprise.  The now almost obsolete word ‘wonderstruck’ suggests that wonder breaks into consciousness with a dramatic suddenness that produces amazement or astonishment.  Because of the suddenness with which it appears, wonder reduces us momentarily to silence.  We associate gaping, breathlessness, bewilderment, and even stupor with wonder, because it jolts us out of the world of common sense in which our language is at home.  The language and categories we customarily use to deal with experience are inadequate to the encounter, and hence we are initially immobilized and dumbfounded.  We are silent before some new dimension of meaning which being revealed.

~ Sam Keen