I have never met a Dominican jaded by the vibrant energy that characterizes life here. Jean Carlos* was no exception. A successful middle-aged Dominican artist, born and raised in Santo Domingo, he had travelled the world over for his art shows and exhibitions and lived abroad in some of the most prominent cultural hubs of Europe. Yet still his face illuminated with wonder as much as mine while cruising through the streets of Santo Domingo late one Friday night. He reveled in the usual sights of the city at night as if it were the first time he had ever laid eyes upon this colorful vitality teeming from every block. I gazed out at the corner colmado from which bachata music was flooding into the cobblestone streets, jolting the hips of pedestrians into motion as they crossed into its sonic threshold. I cracked a smile as I watched five men huddled around a wooden crate, emphatically gesturing hands, shaking with laughter, sending sporadic billows of cigar smoke leisurely up into the fiery red chandeliers of the amapola tree. Conversations, dancing, story telling under the moonlit Caribbean sky—an endangered variety of human contact in a world in which documenting life has taken priority over participation in it.
Jean Carlos throws his hands up and vehemently smacks them back down upon the leather wheel.
Ayyy mi madreeeeee, it’s the damn Saraha Desert otra vez. See there, on the window glass.
What?
Sometimes...the sand from the Sahara Desert, it blow into the island and it gets in the air. Happens every year...
Shut up! You’re tryin to tell me the manchas on the windshield are from desert sands of Africa that have traversed the Atlantic?
Yes, eso es!
What!? No way!—it just looks like salt stains from ocean spray. You’re messing with me—
NO, it is the Sahara sand! Is true. You can look on the internet. Go ahead, Google it, and then you say, Ahhh yes, that Jean Carlos he had the right, telling me of Africa coming to the island.
We laugh as he adjusts his glasses and I reply, Ok, Ok…I believe you, but I will be fact-checking this later.
My night had run over with magic-laced inspiration. Earlier in the evening, I had been invited by the chief curator of the Modern Art Museum to an after-hours event with Puerto Rican creative genius Antonio Martorell, whose collection “Imalabra” is currently featured. The event consisted of a meet-and-greet and performance piece with the artist after which he led us with fuzzy slippers through his exhibit, sharing some of the experiences and collaborations which had contributed to his conceptual framework (or something like that). For as a self-identified “super-adult” (not to be confused with senior) Martorell embodies the philosophy that life—in its multitudes of ephemeral beauty and gut-wrenching sorrow--is not to be taken too seriously. Within moments of his first humor-infused anecdote, it was clear that at the heart of all of his life’s work was a playful curiosity—an unshakeable sense of wonder that has somehow only blossomed with the passing of time and varied spaces which he has inhabited. As he spoke, I felt myself as a moth to the light, with an insatiable desire to get as close as possible to a man who emanated so much light.
Wonder is the most misunderstood, misinterpreted human quality--one which we are all born with, yet rarely do individuals successfully maintain a deep connection with this part of themselves beyond their childhood years. It’s difficult. It’s difficult because society does not value wonder or those who invest significant amounts of time or energy in pursuit of it. It’s associated with idleness, distraction, and lack of productivity. It’s common connotations--innocence, blissful naivety, and a skin of vulnerability expected to be cast off by the time one is of age to internalize the chaos and horrors of our modern reality. As we walk the earth and discover certain dark truths, shame creeps over our sense of wonder so we begin to bury it alive little by little or store it away somewhere dormant and dusty, like the remaining shred of an old baby blanket tucked away in the attic.
There’s simply no space left, is there?
Where is there space for wonder here in this crumbling old house of ours, foundation buckling under the weight of injustice? Where do you put wonder in these rooms crowded with horrors of hate crimes in churches or violent massacres of innocent civilians in the name of power—in the name of greed? What good is wonder when gangs violence turns your home into a loathsome cage in which you lock yourself, out of fear that someone may steal your tomorrow?
Is it absurd to speak of wonder in these times in which we live?
Or if we continue without it, will these times in which we live kill us long before we die?
As children we were soaked in wonder. We admired how ferns curled together. We perceived the magic of simple joys so often overlooked by the adults buzzing efficiently around us. We knew what it meant to be fully present in a moment—a grandmother’s warm embrace, the unique musicality in a person’s voice as they read aloud from a page, the squint of a stranger’s smiling eyes as you look up at them in the checkout line. All of it was worth pondering, worth admiring.
While it’s true wonder isn’t as ubiquitous as it was in my childhood, I find reality increasingly uninhabitable without it. If I pay attention and stay present, I can always find it. Like as I listened to Martorell describe immortality as the beauty of"waking up dispersed in the memories of all the lives you’ve encountered—waking up together.”
And it was wonder I felt as I imagined myself as a single grain of sand among billions, on the spine of a desert dune at sunset. The stillness, the silence, then suddenly whipped up into the pink sky to be carried over 6,000 miles of ocean by nothing more than a current of wind.
Wonder-ful.
