The Soil of Wonder

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

There’s a YouTube video I return to when I need reminding that wonder exists. It opens on the wetlands of Ontario—water catching light, cattails swaying, the quiet symphony of a landscape breathing. Then the camera finds Farmer Dan, standing in his fields with soil under his fingernails and a clarity in his eyes that you can’t fake. Farmer Dan is my son.

At twenty-three, fresh out of university, Dan travelled to Africa searching for something he couldn’t yet name. What he found there was a vision—not a business plan or a career trajectory, but a question that would shape his entire life: “How can I make a difference in the world?” Not “How will I earn a living?” but “How can I serve?”

The distinction matters. One question leads to résumés and promotions. The other leads to wonder.

Dan came back and chose the soil. He studied social work, then realized that true healing required getting to the root—literally. He began farming organically, growing summer fresh vegetables and fifty thousand bulbs of garlic annually in twenty-five varieties, including Persian, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Cuban, Israeli, Sicilian. Each clove a small embassy of the world, planted in Canadian earth.

When I asked him about his purpose, he said something that stopped me: “From one seed, an entire orchard can grow. Therefore, I shall be the healthiest seed I can be.”

This is wonder speaking. Not wonder as passive awe, but wonder as active participation in the miracle of growth, transformation, continuity.

Dan discovered this wisdom not in a book but in the rhythm of seasons, in teaching volunteers how to work in harmony with the land and each other, in making pesto from garlic scapes instead of basil. His farm became his form of social work—a place where health promotion happens through dirt under fingernails, through the satisfaction of harvesting food you planted months ago, through the quiet therapy of being useful.

He told me he loves his life. Not in the hollow way of someone trying to convince themselves, but with the unmistakable ring of truth. “If you spend your life focused on making yourself happy,” he said, “you will be disappointed. But if you focus on being of service, you will grow into happiness.”

Growing into happiness. What a phrase. It suggests that joy is not something we chase or manufacture, but something we cultivate through attention, patience, and care—the same way we grow garlic or raise children or tend relationships.

I think about Dan’s wellness wheel—his belief that health is not a state of being but a practice, requiring attention to all parts of ourselves: mental, physical, emotional, social, spiritual, professional. This too is an act of wonder, this refusal to fragment ourselves into productivity units, this insistence that wholeness matters.

In our culture of optimization and efficiency, choosing the slow work of farming, of community-building, of presence, is quietly radical. It says: I will not accept the lie that speed equals progress. I will not sacrifice depth for breadth. I will plant seeds knowing I won’t see the full harvest for months, maybe not even in this lifetime.

This is what wonder asks of us—not constant ecstasy, but sustained attention. Not ignorance of hardship, but refusal to let hardship be the only story.

Each time I watch the video of Ontario’s wetlands, I am stirred to what I name my “good tears”—tears of wonder, of being moved to my bones. The cattails, the water, the simple fact of a place where salamanders still breed and migrating birds still rest—it’s not dramatic. It’s not the Grand Canyon or the Northern Lights. It’s ordinary, which is to say: it’s miraculous.

Wonder is in the curve of a garlic scape. In the faces of volunteers learning to grow food. In a man who measures success not by profit margins but by soil health and community connection.

I was born in one country, and have lived in Canada, the country of my citizenship for fifty-nine years. Learning from my son, watching him work the land that has adopted and blessed us both, I understand that wonder is the great translator. It’s the language that turns exile into belonging, that transforms labour into love, that makes strangers into neighbours.

Canada has given me wonder. Not because it’s perfect—no place is—but because it nourishes and sustains people like Dan, who take the gift of this vast, beautiful, complicated land and ask: What can I give back? How can I make this place healthier than I found it?

I’m learning that wonder is not something we ask for and receive, but something we practice and become. It’s working with soil that will feed people you’ve never met. It’s looking at an Ontario wetland and feeling your heart crack open with gratitude.

From one person living with intention, an entire community transformed. From one moment of radical amazement, a life reoriented toward meaning.

This is what wonder looks like when it gets its hands dirty. This is what it sounds like when it says: I love my life. I simply cannot imagine a more rewarding one.

Neither can Dan. Neither can I.