Falling Leaves, Falling Wonder

Often, most of us, see a leaf fall from trees preparing for winter, but we don't recognize the leaf.  Our eyes see it spinning, but our minds don't.  No, our minds our spinning over something else.

The falling leaf is just background to the "more important" stuff of life, occupying our thoughts and activities, occupying, say, the grounds of Wall Street over injustice of things much less clear and tangible than that dappled, colored leaf.  We occupy clearly defined tents over issues so much less distinct and graspable than what REI and The North Face produce.  Ironically, we are seeking financial and political answers as clearly defined as the edges and veins of that leaf, but humanity these days seeks stability in so-called material things, like money, that are far from the distinct, vivid qualities of Fall's colored messengers.

In the age of credit cards, how material is money actually?

Most of our "money" is represented by digital code that is not confined within any physical space.  We can't touch digital code.  We can't count physical units of digital code and then receive or give it away into our warm, life-blooded hands.

Little of our money is the physical paper in our wallet we call, "cash," but even that "money" is only a symbol of gold bars we never see in the National Treasury.  Those gold bars, however, aren't full encapsulations of what we mean by "money."  Those gold bars represent value that we can trade to get other things of value.  Somehow, then, we own or seek to own value, but this "value" is certainly not material.  Whether represented by "value" or "digital code," our money doesn't have a temperature, like our hands, because it is immaterial, intangible, yet so much of our worry, focus, and dreams depend on this thing, or better, ideas without warmth or chill.

We rely most on the immaterial for our material needs.

All the while, that leaf, full of texture we can touch, taste, and feel, is falling unnoticed.

All the while, in the shower, our naked bodies feel the warmth of water drops fall over the minutia of grooves in our skin and over the countless hairs protruding from our skull, our armpits, around our excretory holes and sexual organs.

Our bodies feel the warmth, that is, but often, our minds don't.

Like the leaf falling unnoticed, so goes the mystery of our ability to notice an incredible intimacy with the water molecules pouring out of the shower spout above us.

                    Our minds have the ability to notice but almost never do.

We have bought so heavily into the regard of such material things as water drops and falling leaves having small value, unnecessary value even.  How ironic that in an age of materialism, we are actually quite out of touch with the material world.

Remember when I asked you to listen to the drops of water hit the tile and floor and curtain about you, to listen to their impact, for just a few seconds even, in that daily shower of yours?

It strikes me that our minds are so often consumed by the immaterial that we are, in a sense, more akin to the unconscious tiles and curtain around us.

That stuff of ceramic or polyesters has no ability to see, hear, or feel the water drops that impact it.  Like that stuff, we don't hear or feel the water or leaves falling.  We are so consumed in our minds with the immaterial that we, too often, betray one of our greatest gifts: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling material things as material beings.

The thing that separates us from other animals, we've been told, is reason, the ability to be aware of the Self—the mystery of human consciousness and creativity still so elusive to complete explanation by philosophers and neurologists.  This mystery allows us, even delights us, to focus our attention for long periods of time on the immaterial world of ideas like money, love, and video games.

These ideas, however, are not all a human can engage with.  But it seems to me, we spend so much attentive time with these ideas that we miss out, to a significant degree, on what else being human is; we are disengaged with the material stuff we can experience as the other animals do, yet as we can do with even greater appreciation because, ironically, of that immaterial capacity of our brain to bridge with what our neurons see, smell, taste, touch, and hear.

We, humans, are better than any generation before us at explaining things, yet our explanations have done us as much disservice as service.  For we are also better than all previous humans at disengaging with the material world.  Our scientific discoveries of what lightening actually is or what clouds actually are have dulled our interest and, thus, attention of such riddles because they are solved.  We believe them to no longer be riddles.  Why look up into the sky anymore?  The next unexplained thing keeps our attention downward.

And while our skill gets better to dull our focus on the already explained, so does our affinity to not see and appreciate the Mystery that still remains within those "solved" riddles.

In short, we have less wonder in our hearts than any generation before us.