Trade your cleverness for wonder.     – Rumi

After a week of spreadsheets and earnings releases and Bloomberg alerts, it’s easy to get trapped in calculating mental loops, each more strategic and sophisticated than the last. Sometimes it’s a slippery slope from strategic to cynical.

Fortunately we are surrounded by antidotes. A single evening listening to actual humans make music leaves us lighter, connected. A single hour with a painting leaves us open, curious. A single minute with an unfurling fern leaves us hopeful, awestruck.

Dear ones, as my biomimicry teachers urge, let us quiet our cleverness.

Let us seek the wisdom of wonder. 

Let us fill ourselves with earnest delight.

On this day especially, one possible source of wonder is to reflect on all who have nurtured us. Mother’s Day is complicated and painful for many, and at the same time we have all been mothered – by family and friends and teachers and communities and forests and lakes and pets and books and songs and selves. I am one of the very lucky ones who has been supported by all of the above – and most of all, luckiest of all, by my own dear mom, with the most steadfast love I will ever know. If you have ever cared for a person or place or idea with even a tiny fraction of this kind of devotion, thank you. You have made our world a better place.

* Photo from the mesmerizing Dakota Mace exhibit at SITE Santa Fe.