Wonder chamber: a room or cabinet filled with the gathered objects and curiosities by the wealthy and educated 16th and 17th century European.

Every person is a wunderkammern, throughout their life capable of revealing* more of the wonder and uniqueness of who they are and what they have to contribute.  Not only a wonder to others but also to themselves – people are full of surprises and we need to keep surprising ourselves, too.

Some years ago, Christine and I were taken by some friend’s to visit collector Alex Jordan‘s eclectic House on the Rock in Wisconsin – a hideaway he built around a rock, and which grew and grew to house Tiffany glassware to carousels, ship’s propellors and gatling guns.  It is awe-inspiring and unnerving in equal measure (there was an orchestra of mannequins dressed up as celebrities, including Queen Elizabeth and Burt Reynolds!).  Jordan never intended the public to see what he was doing and collecting, and when some people began to ask how much it would cost to have a look around, he came up with an amount which was meant to turn them away.  It didn’t and he began to share his collectings.

It’s a great reminder for how we are all collectors of disparate and unusual and inspiring artefacts and thoughts, but we cannot keep them to ourselves, we must share them in new ways with others.  Austin Kleon writes:

We all love things that other people think are garbage.  
You have to have the courage to keep loving your
garbage because what makes us unique is the diversity
and breadth of our influences, the unique ways in
which we mix up parts of culture others have deemed
as high and low.

John O’Donahue asks his readers to ponder what life might have been like if they were born next door, how different our lives might be.

This brings out intriguing thoughts about how life is not as accidental as we think.  In some way, we were chosen into existence by our parents, directly and sometimes indirectly; these choices have a direct bearing on when and where and who we would be born to be and live.  With this comes a sense of destiny: ‘When you begin to decipher this, your gift and giftedness come alive.’

This is more about deciphering forward, unravelling the future, rather than saying this is what you have to do (because you were born when and where and who you are).  This is about who and what we are becoming, a revealing of our future Self (never fully known): a destiny formed of decisions from our future, not our past.

Humility, gratitude, and faithfulness then become primal attitudes or practices for us towards this destiny.  I am chosen but not because of anything I have done but for the possibility of my unlived future.  I am grateful to others that I am – I had nothing to do with this; and, I have the freedom to create and make something with all of this.

I am grateful to Austin Kleon and John O’Donahue for their thoughts, which I’ve now collected in my  wunderkammern.  By the way, this wunderkammern experience is on loan for maybe eighty years.  No pressure.

(*John O’Donahue points out that ‘the word revelation come from re-valere, literally to veil again.  ‘Behind each human face there is a hidden world which no one can see.  Interesting, we catch glimpses of more in each others lives but never see the full picture.)