A Sense of Wonder Photography was created as a place to share my sense of wonder of the natural world with others through photos. Son of a salt miner and an elementary school teacher, I arrived in Wisconsin over 30 years ago from New York’s Genesee Valley and immediately fell in love with the state’s natural areas. For all of those many years I have felt, along with Jean-Henri Fabre and Wisconsin’
s Aldo Leopold, that beauty and perception “grow at home as well as abroad.” Now, with the luxury of, and shortness of time that comes with age I am able to play, camera in hand, in the great Wisconsin outdoors, particularly in the natural areas that dot Dane and Iowa counties; jewels that provide sustenance to diverse birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects and wildflowers. My interest is to use photography as a means to better see by asking, over and over, two questions posed by Rachel Carson in The Sense of Wonder:
“What if I had never seen this before?”
“What if I knew I would never see it again?”
All humans have deep connections to the natural world; ones born of a history shaped by our interactions with the multitude of species that have inhabited and continue to inhabit the Earth. These connections are expressed by all cultures as deep emotional and spiritual ties to the natural world. This sense of wonder, felt when watching a pair of Red-tail hawks “playing” on invisible bubbles of air or when marveling at the beauty and the migratory feats of Monarch butterflies, may be shelved as the tedium and press of life catches up with us. Yet, to rekindle that wonderment only requires us to allow the child that still exists in each of us to teach our adult self to be childlike again. Carson’s words, from The Sense of Wonder, can be used as a guide to rekindling our own senses of wonder and to help us share that wonder with others. Though writing about enhancing young children’s senses of wonder there can be no doubt but that her admonitions are equally as applicable to adults when she wrote: to adults when she wrote:
"I sincerely believe that for the child, … it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. … Once the emotions have been aroused—a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love—then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate."
