I am in love with the world. Like really, really in love with it.

Imagine you are a deity, sitting there thinking to yourself, “You know what, I should make a world. Create something. Start a universe,” could you ever have come up with the one we have? 

How its matter can be spun and condensed into galaxies, and stars, and planets and how these planets, in their spinning and careening, kick up waves, and wind, and weather…and life? How from the microscopic to the gargantuan, life swam and crawled and burrowed and careened its way across at least one of these planets?
How one particular two-legged, upright member of the living began to think about its own existence? To consider art, and language, and philosophy, and religion? To invent things like cars, and Big Macs, and vaccines, and politics, and sports? To continually try to know its own origins, to understand what, and how, and why this universe is?

I don’t think I could have come up with this. It’s just marvelous.

This is what I hope Wonder Book might be all about, an opportunity to sit back in awe at all that exists–its beauty, its mysteries, its thrills, its bewilderments…even its horrors and sufferings.

Br. David Steindl-Rast, a Trappist monk, has put it something like this: We can’t be grateful for things that are objectively awful. But we can be grateful for the opportunity that each moment affords. It’s all about the opportunity. And even to exist, at all, is a hell of an opportunity.

And so, I suppose this digital space might be a place where I hope to practice gratitude for all that is in front of me, where I can work through this wonder, where I can think aloud, if you will, about the things that continually floor me in the incredibleness of their reality.

And I hope, too, it might be a place where you will journey with me, via the digital ether, in this exercise in wonderment, offering your own insights and musings.

I am humbled that you have had a seat next to me upon this little hillock of the internet. Might that we gaze up and out from it into all that is and all that might be, alight with splendid awe.

Hi, I’m Jordan Foos.

I live with my wife and children in Yankton, SD.