Pop 89: Wonder is the Map

By Madonna Hamel

You can't force wonder, you can't make it happen. But you can facilitate it, make yourself available to it, get in its path. For most young kids, especially if left alone in a sandbox under a blue sky, wonder is their default position, their posture toward life. For adults, it requires attention, an openness to a visit to wonderland.

Last week, I was invited by Diana Chabros to give a wee workshop on courting wonder through collage and writing. It was part of a larger day-long intuitive painting workshop she was giving. I welcomed the opportunity to get myself excited about the ways wonder can enter our lives and chase worry and even grief away, even just for the day.

I like to work with found objects or, as a fellow artist from my school days, used to call them - located objects. Either way, the thrill of working with whatever you have at hand supports my belief and experience that wonder is available to us, no matter where we are. We don't have to buy special equipment, we don't have to have specific skills, and we certainly don't need a vision. In fact, I warn against preconceived ideas about what wonder should look like. Any recollection of a wonder-filled, magical moment will remind you that you did not dream it up - it happened. Like coming up over a rise, hiking in Grasslands National Park, and coming face to face with a bull bison, wonder grabs us. Just like you can't make someone fall in love with you, you can't force wonder.

When I give workshop attendees and students material to collage from, I hand them one magazine or book, not a box full. And then I say: flip through the pages and let the kid in you, or the universe, creator, God, collective unconscious, Muse - however you choose to call it - direct you. In other words, let go of that age-old human illusion of Control.

By allowing the world to render up to you bits and pieces of itself through everything from ticket stubs to old magazines to used wrapping paper, you are engaging with it. Yes, it's a form of recycling - but you are also seeing the value in the old. It is a gesture toward not only saving and re-using materials but also ideas, memories, dreams and reflections activated by the objects.

This is why collage is exciting - it's charged with the energy, the luminous and numinous stories of all its constituent parts. It's honouring pages and pieces that are already worn, pre-read, pre-loved and struggled over, held and beheld and dismissed with or forgotten. And then you come along and make them yours. You imbue them with a new story.

"It's hard to look at a blank canvas and dream up an image from scratch," I say to the small group in front of me. "But when I hold two images together - this and this "- I rip an image of a pile of bones from one magazine and a cartoon drawing of a shack from another and put them side by side," look -a story has already begun. There's a conversation. A new life starts - born of the relationship between the two."

I was lucky to have a mom who read to us at bedtime. My favourite was Robert Louis Stevenson's "A Child Garden of Verses." I was especially thrilled when she read "Escape at Bedtime."

The poem begins with:

"The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out

 Through the blinds and the windows and bars;

 And high overhead and all moving about,

 There were thousands of millions of stars."

And, it ends with:

"They saw me at last, and they chased me with cries,

 And they soon had me packed into bed;

 But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,

 And the stars going round in my head."

Another thrilling poem from childhood was by a contemporary of Stevenson, Walter de la Mare, called "The Listeners," about a traveller who knocks in vain at a door in order to deliver a message and keep an old promise made years ago,

It opens with:

'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller,   

   Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse, in the silence, champed the grasses   

   Of the forest's ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,   

   Above the Traveller's head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;   

   'Is there anybody there?' he said.

It ends with:

"Tell them I came, and no one answered,   

   That I kept my word,' he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,   

   Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house   

   From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,   

   And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,   

   When the plunging hoofs were gone."

Stevenson and de la Mare created their own wonder maps with their work, giving children a chance to escape and gaze in wonder at the world. They remind me that we should not feel at home in the stingy, angry, suspicious world of unhappy adults but rather look toward wonder; in fact, as I wrote once: "Run with Wonder until the fear peters out." One could even say that wonder is the map and the vehicle that brings us to wonder. Ultimately, the map to wonder is the map to home.

Stevenson was a sickly child who spent most of his childhood in bed. But he developed a rich imagination, and later, he wrote "Treasure Island," partially set on the high seas. In fact, he eventually sailed as far as Samoa, where he finally felt at home. He died there.

His epitaph reads:

"Here he lies where he longed to be. 

Home is the sailor, home from the sea, 

And the hunter home from the hill."