The Wonder of Comet Holmes

The Coma around Comet Holmes is now twice the diameter of our sun…twice….

I finally overcame my lack of spatial awareness skills last night as I studied star charts and figured out where I should be looking for this cosmic anomaly in the night sky.

Once I found it I was in awe….my neighbours must have wondered what the hell was going on in my garden as I oohed and ahhed, for what seemed like hours. I was completely taken aback as it appears just like the picture above through my average pair of binoculars. Suddenly I was filled with a myriad of feelings….feeling small,  a little scared but most of all just full of wonder.

Wonder is a fantastic gift we are all born with but which is somehow squeezed out of us as we grow, till we are adults that are almost cardboard cut-outs in comparison to the ‘wonder child’ we once were. Lost in awe as I stared at the strange comet, that seems to have escaped the mainstream media, I remembered a wonder -full passage from The Way of Wonder by Jack Hass

 All is magnificent. All is marvelous. All is mysterious.

 We live in a world of impossibility, implausibility, and awe. We look, we see, we wonder. We experience the sudden opening to the inexplicable vastness, the weirdness, the overwhelming profundity, the utter miracle and magic of life, of ourselves, and of all that is.

  These are the numinous moments when the monumental impossibility and spaciousness of existence opens up before and within us, granting us the rare and spectacular interruptions of our day-to-day consciousness. Call it what you will: wonder, awe, satori, samadhi, newness of mind, ignorance, innocence, original mind, or childlike perception- it is the hallmark of a mind which has come to know the incomprehensible magnitude of all and everything, and from which the individual is ‘opened up’ and therefore reunited with the Great Mystery which is our birthright.