Swimming With Turtles: How Wonder Reconnects Us
To the Natural World

Susan Baur

Photo: Robin Melavalin

COVER HERE

My book recounts how, over the course of eighteen years, as I swam with the pond turtles of Cape Cod, moments of wonder let me see beyond my own concerns and assumptions into the single, great ecosystem which supports us all: nature went from things I could use to beings I could relate to.

Although a growing number of books decry the exploitation of the natural world and some point to awe, wonder, and enchantment as powerful antidotes, none (to my knowledge) follows, step by step, the transformation that wonder generates.. As a psychologist who understands how difficult it is for anyone to change significantly, I wanted to know how wonder captivates, charms, leads through long periods of painful unlearning, then cracks open the self and delivers unanticipated joy and support. The Irish writer, Iris Murdoch, observed that “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love . . . is the discovery of reality.” My book describes how this happens.

That night as I lay in bed listening to Peter fall asleep, I took myself back to the pond to marvel again at those copper-shelled turtles. There they were climbing upward through the light, their flickering little feet and gleaming shells drawing me into a wonderland. I did not know it at the time, but I had begun feeling my way along a path that would lead me in great twists and turns out of the world I knew and into another.