Beyond intellect, beyond talent, beyond the blessings and curses we inherit in our genes, lies something apart from all that: a capacity for the experiencing of wonder.

It has nothing to do with being smart, gifted or good looking.

It is simply the ability to feel wonder.

What percent of the adult population experiences wonder? How often?

Who can say? Pollsters do not pose such questions, do not chronicle and report the responses.

My hunch is that, as children, we all have a capacity for wonder. As our lives unfold, most of that capacity is leached away, supplanted by what could be termed “The Habitual,” i.e., the ways of being that we adopt in order to manage the challenges of everyday existence.

Still, for some, maybe for many, moments come when we pass through “gateways,” encounter wonder, and then return to the humdrum.

We return, yes, but we do not forget our best “gateway moments.”

I remember a roadside “scenic overlook” in Kauai, Hawaii, where we looked out across a vast green valley and counted SEVEN distant, towering waterfalls, each dropping silken ribbons of froth hundreds of feet into basins hidden from view by foliage.

I remember gazing for two hours or more at the stars while laying on the bottom of my canoe anchored in the middle of a lake, itself in the middle of Canada’s Algonquin Provincial Park.

Those gateways were literally exotic, far from my lifelong home in what some might call “ho-hum Ohio.” Yet, even here, in the semi-countryside just east of Cincinnati, there are “gates of wonder” near at hand.

Walking the dog, a few weeks ago, I saw perhaps 800 Canada geese flying overhead in their iconic “V” formations, the most I’d ever seen. I counted fifteen huge “V’s” passing above me in about two minutes. It was “WONDER-full.”

This past summer I tried my hand at drawing clouds, a fascinating challenge. It made me look closely at clouds -- flocks of the majestic cumulus nimbus clouds, each a vaporous mountain. They are constantly changing shape and color. Only the tops of them are white, have you noticed? We think of clouds as being white but they are mostly shades of gray and blue. They seem to have been blown here from far away, but actually they arise from the very ground on which we stand. A wonder is what clouds are.

I think back to just a week ago, when uncountable trillions of snowflakes fell for hours, each one a masterpiece of filigreed symmetry, no two alike. Only think of that!

Last Sunday afternoon, just as the early darkness was setting in, once again on a walk with the dog, I stopped and singled out a solitary flake among the hundreds clustered on the sleeve of my coat. I raised my arm until the angle allowed the setting sun to strike through it, as through a fleck of translucent quartz. Nothing could be less significant than a snowflake; yet each is charged with all the forces of the universe.

That one snowflake constituted “all that science probes and poets sing and saints adore.”

So far my examples of my own gates of wonder were all inspired by Nature. The creations of my fellow humans have also sometimes filled me with wonder.

I think of the astonishing cave paintings we saw replicated in Lascaux II in southwestern France. We were awestruck. We carry that awe with us still, when we recall that day.

Lascaux is far away and our visit there was thirty years ago, but there is another human-made thing close at hand that I am experiencing even as I write these words.

Not twenty inches distant from my nose is my computer screen, the portal through which my thoughts and music are transmitted to you every Sunday morning. There’s a wonder, right in front of you, right now!

A few years ago I was fiddling about on my computer when an email arrived from my clarinetist friend Lucien Aubert, telling me that, so as to be present for a rehearsal of my music, he had ridden the ferry from his home in Corsica to Nice on the southern coast of France, a 3.5 hour journey, only to find that he had left behind his sheet music for the clarinet part of my score. Upon his request, I sent the requisite PDFs of the clarinet part and he had them in hand -- presto! -- not two minutes after sending me that message from 5,000 miles away. A miracle! A wonder!

In the phrase attributed to the Persian poet Hafiz, “The only relevant spiritual question is why aren't you dancing with joy right now?"

Pondering the gates of wonder, far and near, through which I have passed, it occurred to me to try to express, in music, something about those gates and what we feel when we pass through them to discover what lies on the other side and then return.

The result of my asking myself that question is my new piece for cello and piano, “The Gates of Wonder,” which you can hear, right now, performed by cellist Michael Ronstadt and pianist Beth Troendly, simply by clicking on the LINK just below these words. And that, too, is a WONDER!

35 years ago nothing like a “LINK” even existed. How could I have shared my music with you back then? Only by producing and then mailing an “LP” to you, a cumbersome and expensive undertaking which I could not have afforded.

The piece begins with the piano evoking a musical image of great, heavy gates opening, a series of chords which returns at the end when they gates are closing. In between comes, as best I can conceive and render, the cello playing the music of wonder.

To hear “The Gates of Wonder,” click on the link above. There's also a link to a PDF of the score.

Rick Sowash
Cincinnati, OH
Dec. 21, 2025