MINNESOTA EXOTICA – Wonders Close to Home

Minnesota exotica. If that strikes you as an oxymoron, you probably live here, and you're not alone. A culture of self-effacing modesty and moderation in all things—a legacy, I suppose, of our German-Lutheran heritage—tends to keep our enthusiasm about even the most spectacular experiences bottled up inside.

Even transplants to Minnesota, largely free of such constraints, hesitate to rave about the amazing natural assets they find here because no one else in the country would believe that a place they see as somewhere between wild west and arctic tundra could possibly offer anything more exotic than the characters in Fargo.

Their loss.

TURNABOUT IS FAIR PLAY
I must admit, with my own German-American heritage, to being afflicted with a bit of that uniquely Minnesotan modesty. But another factor in my not extolling the wonders of my own state is that universal human fault of failing to appreciate those things most familiar to us. This is one reason, I suppose, why I crave adventures in other countries, especially those where animals, plants and landscapes are very different from those I've come to take for granted here at home.

So I realized it might help me, and those of you who may also have grown apathetic to all the beauty you live with every day, to try seeing it as if it were for the first time. It helps if I imagine some of my friends from around the world coming here, and what I would want to show them. For, just as I have stood wonder-struck before the natural “exotica” of their Baja California, their Kenya, their Veracruz, Andalucía or Costa Rica, I know they would see my world in the same way I see theirs.

If you make room for wonder in your heart, you may find yourself awestruck by a speck of dust.

SEARCHING BEHIND YOUR EYES
In three and a half years writing this blog, and another six or seven writing of my experiences with small wonders (work I'd later distill for my first book, Under the Wild Ginger – A Simple Guide to the Wisdom of Wonder, I've learned a few things about how people see—or don't see—the world around them.

One of those lessons is that wonder is as much a place in the heart and spirit as it is any specific object or event. You don't have to go to some faraway place to find it. It starts within you, right where you are. And if you make room for it among the clutter you may find yourself awestruck by a speck of dust.

Believe that all of Creation, far and near, beyond you and within you, is a lovingly beautiful place.

So keep your eyes—and your spirit—open. Indulge the curiosity of a five-year-old that still resides in you. Try to see even the simplest and most familiar of Nature's gifts as if you were seeing them for the first time. And, above all, believe that all of Creation, far and near, beyond you and within you, is a lovingly beautiful place. Expect wonder.

What are some of the workaday wonders you catch yourself taking for granted? Here are some from my everyday world here in Minnesota, USA.

Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness

Long-ear sunfish - PHOTO: Brandon Brown

Sugar maples ablaze – Autumn in Minneapolis

Snow on crab apple tree

Snowflake

Moose – Superior National Forest

Split Rock Lighthouse, Lake Superior - PHOTO: Brynn

Agate – PHOTO: Lech Darski

State flower – pink and white lady slipper

Birch trees

Painted bunting – PHOTO: Doug Janson

Surfing Lake Superior

OUT OF THE ORDINARY – The Amazing Story of... EVERYTHING!

In 1998, Steve Hartman, a young CBS reporter, undertook a fascinating experiment with his On The Road* series. He would go to a map of the United States, close his eyes and point blindly to a spot somewhere in the country. Then he’d go to that place, or, more precisely, to the nearest burg big enough to have a telephone directory.

Once he arrived in AnyTown, USA, he’d go to the first telephone booth he found, open up the White Pages to a random page, and once again covered his eyes and pointed. Whichever name his finger settled on would be the subject of his story. Then he went and interviewed that person.

Whether it was Bill, the ebullient banker from Boise, Patti, the paraplegic paramedic from Peoria or Ulysses, the unemployed utility worker from Utica, it turned out each person had a fascinating, compelling story to tell.

WHOSE STORY IS IT ANYWAY?
I don’t recall feeling that Hartman’s concept was anything much more than entertaining, but its return to mind many times since then suggests otherwise. It reminds me of something it turns out I’ve been learning on my own all along: that everyone—and everything—has a story. Every one of us has faced challenges, celebrated triumphs, loved and lost, created something unique and coped, in one way or another, with whatever life has thrown at us.

This is why those random, average-Jane-or-Joe interviews were so significant. Their lesson reminds me, every time a make a judgement about something solely in the context of my own experience and values, that I just might be missing something. Like when I lambasted the woman driver who cut me off this morning as I was trying to exit the crosstown.

          I realize now is that all that negativity 
          was based not on her story, but mine.

Believe me, I had no trouble characterizing that woman as aggressive, thoughtless, greedy and just about any other negative judgement you can think of. But what I realize now is that all that negativity was based not on her story, but mine.

I'd been running late myself. I imagined myself to be nicely in control of my life and, truth be told, was probably thinking of nothing more than the lovely, sweet, frothy cappuccino I was about to pick up at Espresso Royale. To me at that moment the woman had no story—other than that single-minded self-indulgence I’d so conveniently ghostwritten for her.

I don’t know what that woman’s story was. But I do know she had one. Maybe it was that she’d just found out her child was injured at daycare. Maybe she’d just lost her job and pondered a future with no income and no savings. Or maybe she was off soaring in the rarefied air of new love. Whatever.

EVERYTHING HAS A STORY
Wouldn’t the world be a kinder, gentler place if we all understood that everything—every person, every creature, every growing thing, indeed every stream and grain of sand—has a story? Not just the story we may have written for it—one so often about what it can do for us—but its own story about how it got there, why it belongs there and, if not, where it needs to go.

     What happens to one organism or one thing 
     has an effect on…well, everything.

Each of these people, each of these things, is significant, not just to the other people and things closest to it, but to the universe. Okay, maybe that’s over-
reaching a bit…or is it? Indeed, there is a growing body of research, not to mention a groundswell of people around the world who know it but perhaps can’t prove it, suggesting that what happens to one organism or one thing has an effect on…
well, everything.

This so-called “butterfly effect”—the fact that a small change at one place in a system can result in immense differences in a different place or a subsequent state—can occur in many ways, perhaps most notably, ways we don't notice and can never fathom. That's why I so often say that wonder is at least partly an act
of faith.

Children and Nature author and visionary Richard Louv reminds us that people won’t love what they don’t know, and that in order for folks to care enough to protect and preserve our dwindling supply of Natural wonder we need to help kids learn about Nature and their place in it.

For by learning the stories of animals, plants, water and the land—and of the places each inhabits—they begin to write their own.

* Hartman did On the Road for seven years, until 2005, and then, in 2010, reprised the series on a global scale.