Wonderbringers Newsletter with Monica Parker
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Hello, Wonderseekers,
No video this week. I am not ready yet to add my voice to the din. I have written a few thoughts, however.
This week has been absolutely devastating to watch. But of course, we aren’t the ones actually being devastated and we aren’t the ones really watching it. We’re just voyeurs.
As a child, I was fascinated with war photographers. The idea that someone would put themselves in harm’s way just to document. To be the watcher so those of us from away could get a small glimpse. To be the watcher so others could not deny the atrocities. But now it isn’t professional photographers doing the documenting but the people themselves. Viscerally communicating the horror of their lives. And we watch.
We can’t turn away and ignore the pain. We have to be the watcher now, too. Nor can we bathe in their horror and then slip into our comfortable beds and turn off the light.
Empathy levels are dropping and one reason is that we are becoming desensitised to the despair we see. It feels so distant as we consume the pixels of pain that our psyches have learned to separate a stranger’s sorrow from our own heart.
So I am trying to balance. Watch, so I can document the horrors. And turn away, so I can preserve my humanity. It’s an agonizing tightrope, but at least I get to choose to scroll on when it becomes too much. Others cannot.
Today I’m going to be giving a speech on Wonder and I’ve changed it up a bit to mention some of the existential threats facing us, two of which are polarization and dehumanisation.
I plan to close the session with this quote:
“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.”– Rachel Carson
So I hope you spend the next week trying to find the wonders in your world so that we may possibly stop the destruction of our world.
Some wonderbringers for me this week:
A bit of eye candy of sorts, for you this week. I offer these videos as a cleansing respite from the crisis new cycle.
Something a bit nostalgic and beautiful: Cellia Willis’s exuberant “ An ode to being 15 in the pre-internet age | Venetian Men”
Bird flight patterns as art: Photographer Xavi Bou’s transcendental work “Ornithographies”
Mesmerizing: Air Fountain by Daniel Wurtzel.
On October 23rd, you can see me take part in the Global Oneness Summit. The theme this year is Conscious Creativity. There are almost 50 sessions and it is free to attend. Other presenters include Rainn Wilson (of The Office fame) and self-help veteran Neale Donald Walsch.
With wonder,
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