Wonderlust

     I miss spelled “wandering” in my blog yesterday; my Mom pointed it out to me. Wandering, wondering, it’s really all the same to me. It’s the wonder that make me wander. And she’s the one that taught me this wonder. Everything I brought to Mom was wonderful and interesting. The slugs on the front porch, the shooting stars we waited out late for in the frost, and every person my Mom met seemed wonderful to her. And every new idea or bit of information was a time to sit and wonder, to sit and think and study it. And I, as a nine-year-old, wandered all over our field and forest off that dirt road in Locust Grove Georgia, and I felt the awe of God’s creation… the wonder.  And, as a 13 year old, sitting on Jackson Lake I thought “nothing could be better than this.” And God smirked and said, “You think so?” God loves me when I awe at His wonder.  He takes me places just so I can look out and be struck by it, by Him. Standing on a riverboat at 18 years old, I was consumed by the massiveness and beauty of the churning waters and the curved trunks stuck out like snorkels. “God I didn’t know something so big and gray could seem so majestic.” He smiled at me, “Do you think so? What about this?” At 19, I stood staring over endless red roofs, from a castle, a real castle. I was struck by awe. “God could You create beings to have such ingenuity?” I could feel His pleasure. He could create them and He did. When I tell people my tales of travel, I try not to smile so broadly but I can’t help it. They look at me and say, “You must have a good deal of wanderlust in you!” Yeah, I guess so wonderlust. Going out to eat with my parent’s I meet a creature full of wonder at the sink in the bathrooms. She is small, her eyes are beaming, she can’t reach the water, I pick her up, and hold her to the stream. She doesn’t know me, but she doesn’t care, she splashes her hands through the stream and laughs. More joy in that laughter then a person should be allowed. I didn’t mean to be a wanderer, His wonder drew me out. I meant to marry young and settle down. But here I go still tripping along. And I sat down with Him, I told Him “You are wonderful.” And I sang to Him on our hill top in Jackson Georgia. He said, “Follow me and you’ll have no place to lay your head.” And I thought of comfort and security, of wealth and self-sufficiency but it did not compare to His wonder. So I packed my bags and I’ve kept them packed, I’m just a wanderer, searching for His wonderful country.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory