Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Do you, like me, sometimes wonder where the wonder went? Did it disappear in a puff of wonderment?

When I decide to watch a random streaming flick, I often look for a ‘space’ movie. Something set out there, big enough to give that sense of wonder you would have flying through the starred heavens.

I never really find it. My yearning for cinematic wonder is mostly unfulfilled.

Is it Star Wars’ fault? For me, probably. I was 6 when I visited that far far away galaxy, with its many aliens, locations, and adventures. Most of all, there were these huge shots of being in space, sequences of flying through the stars, so kinetic and exciting, sequences that transported you there, and left you wanting more. First impressions last, and that was the space adventure I’ve always yearned to have replicated, and never truly has been, even by its creator. This is, as they say, a bummer.

I welcome all wonder-filled space adventure film suggestions.

I had much the same experience reading The Hobbit, 15-17 times by the time I was 10 years old, along with the Narnia books I read constantly, lying in bed in my school clothes reading them before getting up for breakfast. Worlds I could not get enough of visiting. When I read The Lord of the Rings at 9 (after a glorious failure at 7) I swear I spent 6 months dreaming of and in middle-earth. It contained so many wonders to explore, inspired awe, elicited comfort, provoked imagined bravery.

Wonder was all around me as a child. I was suffused with it, yet always yearned for more.

New experiences continued, and made their imprint upon me, but things became ‘cool’ rather than wonderful. Even as I adored new experiences and worlds, a little distance crept in.

Now I’m a jaded old fart.

But. But but but. I have rediscovered a yearning for wonder. I have experienced it in the real world, as simple and as awe inspiring as dawn lighting the sky over the Rockies. Wonder still exists, and I find it in the simple things of nature now more than in any spectacle or fiction.

But. I’d like a little wonder-stuff in my fiction too. I do think you have to be open to its possibility to find it. Too jaded and you might kill wonder in the crib as you read it or behold it on a screen. You have to participate in it, believe, and be entranced. Wonder then can be a reward you earn, if you are willing to embrace it.

I’m about to write a deeply pessimistic book. Again. Wonder is in short supply there. One day, dammit, I’m going to write a book that tries to convey wonder, and to do that I’ll need to keep openness in my own heart, even if what I write may wade through the darker recesses of human action and motivation. I do still see the light, like Eärendil’s star, glimmering in that darkness, a promise of dawn.

It might seem fruitless in this jaded world of electronic distractions, my friends, but don’t lose your sense of wonder. There is a big beautiful world out there (and in here, within each and every one of us), and we, each and every one of us, deserve to gaze upon it, and be transported.