Discipline of Perception

What is the sense of wonder? Perhaps language was invented to deconstruct and to objectify the data we collected through our senses.

"Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood."
― Chuck Palahniuk

Glacier and the Tree by Alex Proimos

How is beauty perceived?

Much of perceived beauty cannot be explained. The path toward deepening one's understanding is a discipline as gratifying as it is perplexing.

Photograph by Aleš Jungmann

"Listen closely... the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on. This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it."
― Jack Kerouac

Photograph by Aleš Jungmann

Tuning Our Senses

Responding to the urge to immerse myself, I deliberately alert my mind to the prospect of incoming data. I have experienced the automaton-like phenomena of pinging my senses in a sort of mental roll-call:

What can I see? What can I smell? What can I hear?

Yet in what I imagine to be heightened awareness, I am often surprised ― not by what I see, hear, or smell, rather by the flicker of something I have just missed.

A School of Minnows

Sensual acuity is like a muscle needing the discipline of exercise and practice.

Annie Dillard devotes a chapter to Seeing in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She writes that the most obvious objects in nature are often the most difficult to see.

Nature is one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children.
― Annie Dillard

We are creatures deceived by expectation. Often we only see what we expect.

My eyes account for less than one percent of the weight of my head. I'm bony and dense; I see what I expect.― Annie Dillard

How do we tune our senses to the unexpected?

If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be reached by search or trail. ― Heraclitus