On "stimulating your awareness of beauty and wonder"

 

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.  - Emerson

I found this summary of a talk by Illustrator and Author John Muir Laws.  (Check out Muir Laws' blog and see one of his examples of the video talks he gives here.)

In this paragraph, there are several themes that I've been circling: being open to the world, seeing the world with beauty and wonder, things that dull our apprehension of the world, and... METHODS and PRACTICES for opening our senses. 

For the second half of his talk, Laws discussed his approach to nature journaling and how to emulate it. In his view, it’s a way of stimulating your awareness of beauty and wonder — which also helps make the things that you see more memorable. The trick is that your brain gets acclimated to things that it thinks it already knows (oh, another California poppy, or even more impoverished: Oh, another orange flower) so it gets inured to the wonder-filled things happening around it all the time. Laws counters that with a three part approach designed to stimulate awareness, curiosity, and creativity. For each thing you record, note these three things:

Awareness: “I see…”: You notice something, draw a picture of it, make notes about it

Creativity: “It reminds me of…” (or more simply “IRMO”): You consciously seek out analogies to what you’ve seen and make notes about those

Curiosity: “I wonder…”: You ask questions or create hypotheses about what you’ve seen.

 As an additional stimulus, Laws suggests making three kinds of notes on every page: drawings, words (descriptions), and numbers (measurements). That helps engage a wider range of your brain’s abilities and contributes to the awakening of awareness, creativity, and curiosity.