Something wondrous: Mozart's Starling

There is another world," Paul Eluard wrote, "but it is in this one." One world is marked by bland forgetfulness, where we do not permit ourselves an openness to the simple, graced beauty that is always with us. The other is marked by attentiveness, aliveness, love. This is the state of wonder, which is commonly treated as a passive phenomenon--a kind of visitation or feeling that overcomes us in the face of something wondrous. But the ground of the word, the Old English wundrian, is very active, meaning "to be affected by one's own astonishment." We decide, moment by moment, if we will allow ourselves to be affected by the presence of this brighter world in our everyday lives. Certainly we get no encouragement from what Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls the "overculture." It cannot be assessed by the standardized cultural criteria of worth--measures that can be labeled with a sum or a statistic or even, perhaps, a word. Receptivity to wonder is not economically productive, marketable, quantifiable. The rewards, also, stand beyond such calculation. But it is in such receptivity that we discover what draws us, and along with it our originality, our creativity, our soulfulness, our gladness, our art. Mozart found inspiration in the presence of a common bird. For us, too, the song of the world so often rises in places we had not thought to look.

--from pp 74 - 75 of Lyanda Lynn Haupt's Mozart's Starling 

Three chapters in, this book has me reconsidering my attitude towards starlings.