Beauty Part II – Second Naïveté

Small Wonders

Blindness to beauty can occur when we allow ourselves to become bored with what we perceive as the commonplace, or even worse, when we develop a subtle form of contempt for the familiar. Maybe at first we take small wonders for granted. It’s just a short trip from there to failing to see the constant flow of the miraculous reaching out to us. The wonderment of childhood is lost.

Once, my four year old came running in from outdoors and in a flurry of words attempting to explain seeing a rainbow. The words disintegrated into weeping at the wonder of what had appeared in the sky, at the miraculous gift reaching out in a very personal and profound way.

The capacity for wonderment is never really lost. It goes dormant in the process of adapting to the cultural demands that are put on us to become more sophisticated. Our naïveté goes underground, so far under that it seemingly disappears.

It is possible to be “shocked” back online to wonderment, like the time I saw an octopus morph both the color and texture of its skin to blend so perfectly with its environment that it essentially disappeared, or like when my husband and I drove up into the mountains in the dark night and I saw the edge of the Milky Way for the first time since I was a little girl. Seeing the unbelievable occur right before your eyes, standing on the edge of the galaxy, these are mind-bending experiences. We can experience a second naïveté.

In an article, “Second Naïveté” on the website Desert Spirit Press (March 7, 2018) Paul Ricoeur’s view of second naïveté is discussed as a journey from a pre-critical state, something akin to childhood wonderment, into something akin to cynicism, or what Ricoeur calls “a desert of criticism” and then moving on to a place he calls post-critical, or second naïveté. One of the characteristics of coming to a post-critical frame of reference is that metaphor, myth, symbolism and the like retain their value on a deeper level of understanding. We make a conscious choice to believe something trans-rational.

Though Ricoer’s thoughts on second naïveté deal primarily with issues of faith, the concept can be applied to our relationship with the world in general.

Ron Rolheiser is quoted in that same article suggesting that we make a choice to enter a second naïveté by “making a deliberate and conscious effort at assuming the posture of a child…regaining the primal spirit, a sense of wonder, the sense that reality is rich and full of mystery…” He warns of the need to purge ourselves of “cynicism, contempt and all attitudes which identify mystery with ignorance…”

For me, a great place to start has been on my everyday walk by the creek. Since COVID-19 I’ve been nudged off the concrete path to keep a precautionary distance between me and other walkers, I’m often forced down to the edge of the creek. So I’ve just been lingering there, like I used to when I first became acquainted with the area. And in the process I’ve remembered how in love I was with the creek then and I’ve renewed that love affair. I brought my camera the other day and let the lens zoom in on details that I would otherwise miss. The fastidious preening habits of the birds down in the water, the raindrops held in suspension on the petal of a lone, deep purple iris, patterns of the water as it dances over the rocks.

I want to be in touch and stay in touch with that little girl who was in awe of the majestic right under her nose. I need her now. I need her innocence and ability to find beauty in the very small and common things that I to often take for granted. I need the primal hunger for primal beauty hidden in all of life. I need the faith of a child that connects her with beauty.

How do you find the primal child who lives somewhere inside?

Writing Prompt for the Week: Shocked into Wonderment