My daughter called yesterday to tell me about a tree in the yard that came alive the day after a cold night in New England. The tree was shaking as if a giant monster was hidden there, bringing whatever lay in its branches down to the ground with flourish.

“It must be squirrels,” she said, and I seized on the moment to change her thoughts from Kim Kardashian to the wonders of the world.

“The squirrels are getting ready for winter,” I told her, sounding more like a wise old man than I really liked. “Since it was cold last night, they got busy today, storing nuts for the winter.”

I quickly Googled some other interesting facts, dazzling her with squirrel habits and squirrel instincts. “They won’t store all the nuts in one place, which is smart. They’ll store them in several secret spots. The ones they forget about often grow into trees. In fact, we might be able to thank forgetful squirrels for entire forests.”

She sounded charmed but for one minute only, and I thought “I’ll take it.”

There are so many little miracles happening all around us, and in every second of our lives–notwithstanding the human body, which is more amazing than anything ever created by man. If the fact that every minute your body creates 25 million new cells doesn’t stop you in your tracks, you might have lost the ability to be impressed by anything.

How do this grab you:

Each of us carries stardust. Every atom in our bodies that are heavier than hydrogen was forged inside an ancient exploding star.

When we’re so focused on our complicated lives, what with all the working, shopping, and sleeping that tends to shape our existence, we begin to lose our awe. And once that happens, life can become very dull. We disconnect from the miracles–both big and small–that remind us we are connected to the universe.

While that might sound dramatic, consider this: the design of the cosmos reflects the design of human life–from the magnificence of the human body to the sweeping curves of the Mississippi River. It says, look! These things are one and the same.

If you stand back far enough, as if studying a map on a drafting table, you can see it everywhere: the earth’s rivers branching off like the veins under our skin, lightning moving through the sky the way neurons fire in our brains. In fact, the neurons in our brains fire in constellations that look eerily like the maps astronomers draw of distant galaxies.

We are, apparently, not just in the universe–we are made of its repetitions.

And also this: galaxies spiral like seashells. The chambers of the heart mirror the chambers of the earth. Even our breath rises and falls like the tides–an inhale, an exhale, as if we are tiny oceans disguised as people.

Science has tidy names for all this: fractals, geometry, patterns that repeat. It seems the universe only had one set of blueprints, so it printed them everywhere.

This both amazes me and confounds me. The imagery is breathtaking, yes, but the truth changes the way you see yourself in this world. You stop asking, “Do I belong here?” and start realizing, “I am here because I am part of here.”

Have you ever wondered why these incredible facts remain mostly unknown? Have we stopped teaching our children that life itself is fantastic, far better than any Amazon package that might come to their door?

The COVID pandemic kept us indoors. Video games and cell phones keep us inside instead of outside where all the wonder is. Maybe we all need fifteen minutes on our back porch everyday so we can look around and observe the natural world long enough to really appreciate it.

In my research, I read about the bar-tailed godwit (who knew that was even a bird?). Picture it: a tiny, brown-feathered creature taking flight from the edge of a place like Alaska into the dark Pacific after sundown. It beats its wings over endless water for days, even weeks–lonely, driven. Science explains this with magnetic fields and stored fat reserves, but those words don’t quite explain the endurance, the bird’s constitution to survive, or the sheer mystery of it. I know people who can’t find their way to Target in another town without their GPS, and even then it’s iffy. I wouldn’t survive ten minutes on that journey.

Maybe we should start a movement where we encourage others to pay attention to the little things. Because they’re not really little–they’re keys to understanding ourselves and our place in the world. If that’s too much, just do it because it’s interesting.