One hope of mine, when I started this blog, was that regularly writing about wonders would force me to seek out new material week by week. Hopefully, I thought, this practice will make me pay more attention.
And it has – so much, in fact, that I sometimes find myself at a loss for which wonder to write about on a given occasion.
Once my niece and nephew and I were all buckled in the backseat of my sister’s ancient Montero, I turned to my nephew – proudly perched in his new booster seat – and asked, “So what was your favorite part of our adventure, buddy?”
“Um…” he said, grinning. “All of it.”
“All of it!” I repeated, arranging my souvenir bag on the floor as we pulled out of the parking lot, my hips wedged tightly between the two car seats, my shoulders scrunched. “That was pretty yummy chocolate, huh?”
“Um, yeah. And machines! Machines that make chocolate! It’s like a dream come true!” My nephew giggled, beaming out the window. “I’d need some pretty big Legos to make something that cool.”
Huh, I thought, the obvious dawning on me. I should’ve taken pictures inside the factory.
Continue reading “Ethel M. Chocolate Factory & Cactus Garden – Henderson, Nevada”
A month ago, I started a post on Loi Krathong, hoping to get it up before tossing everything in the car and heading off to California. I obviously didn’t manage that, so here we are!
So now I’ll explain my absence.
Continue reading “Loi Krathong – Or, Float, Little Lotus Boat”
Here’s my earliest memory of trick-or-treating: Mom gave me and my siblings each a large cardboard box to decorate with doors, windows, and all the necessary amenities for modern life. Then, dressed in our lovingly-handmade costumes, we each took turns circling the little cardboard neighborhood, carefully traversing the pale blue rug with our candy bags extended.
From within our cardboard houses, we gave each other cough drops and homemade donut holes – cough drops because, in early-90s Bangkok, there wasn’t much other hard candy to be had, and donut holes because my mother thought the cough drop situation was a bit too sad.
When I was three or four years old, random friendly grown-ups started asking me what color this or that was, what my favorite food was, and what my daddy did for work.
“He’s a geophysicist!” I’d announce, and they’d look at my parents with something like awe, and make a comment about how smart I was to know a word like geophysicist.
I’ve always enjoyed a compliment, but if we’re being fair, I didn’t actually know the word. I could pronounce it, sure, and that’s not nothing for a pre-schooler, but I didn’t know what it meant. Flabbergasted I could use in a sentence, thanks to a Little Golden Book featuring poems about Sesame Street characters. Geophysicist, not so much.
Continue reading “Crystal Metamorphing into Something Dad-ish”
Katrina and I stepped under the pale stucco archway. To our left, tucked between the eastern and southern arches, stood a tall statue of Sekhmet, ancient Egypt’s lion-headed goddess. To our right, between the eastern and northern entries, was an altar covered in small representations of the Divine Feminine: Quan Yin, the Venus of Willendorf, Parvati. The flagstone floor glistened with desert rocks, sand, and small glass pebbles.
Above us, open sky beckoned beyond a dome of intersecting copper circles.
Gazing up, I realized I’d made an error. The small, open temple wasn’t cut off from the Mojave Desert surrounding it, but the feel within its walls was different enough, and familiar enough. Sacred space.
“Hey,” I said, looking back at my sister. “I need to take off my shoes.”
Katrina stepped backwards several steps. “I was thinking the same thing.”
Continue reading “Temple of Goddess Spirituality – Cactus Springs, Nevada”
If you’ve been following Crystal Witnesses Wonders, you know I usually use quirky personal anecdotes as the basis for my posts. But what if you’d like to experience more wonder in your own life? What if you’d like to spend more time in awe, more time amazed, more time delighted at the world around you?
Let’s take an experimental detour this week. If it’s a dreadful disappointment, we’ll return immediately to our regular programming and never speak of this again. If you’d like more content like this, please say so in the comments below. I’ll definitely have more to say about each of these five tips.
But right now, let’s dip our toes into some how-to goodness. Keep reading for advice on the Adventure Attitude, Starting Small, Making Mindfulness, Cultivating Curiosity, and Gathering Gratitude.
Continue reading “Five Tips for Living a Wonder-filled Life”
Crystal Witnesses Wonders 