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The clarity the desert brings. Hurricanes and hard relationships. Finding reason in the middle of a ruin. Small Wonders are quiet but profound observations about life from Dr. Laurel Moffatt. In each fifteen-minute episode, Laurel uncovers lessons learned from broken and beautiful things that are polished to perfection and set in rich audio landscapes for your consideration.
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Welcome to the final episode of season 3 of Small Wonders! A new year approaches - and for many, a new set of resolutions. Reading, going to the gym, travelling, lifestyle changes: all of us have a “possible self” that we strive towards. It turns out we’ve been making New Year resolutions for a very long time - at least 4,000 years in fact, accordi…
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The Summerbell Window - a beautiful stained glass window - sits in the Holy Trinity Church in Millers Point, Sydney. It's not like the other windows: it shows a stormy sea, with Jesus calming the tempest. It commemorates the loss of the Yarra Yarra - a steamer captained by William Geoge Summerbell, the namesake of the window - which disappeared on …
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We will always work for food. The question is - which food are we working for? "Daily bread" has become a well-worn idiom; we all need it to get by, and without it, life wouldn't be possible. However, such a simple phrase fails to capture the complexity of actually finding daily bread. From the wheat harvesters to produce the bread, to the toil of …
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Transfer of Learning: To take something from one context and apply it in another. For many teachers, this is the goal of their job; to impart specific knowledge to students that they can use in the wider world. However, the transfer of learning isn't about just getting things right - it's about being able to get things wrong too. Researchers have f…
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Do you believe in ghosts? You should. The chances are, you are one. According to a Yougov poll conducted in 2021, roughly 40% of people polled believe in the traditional sort of ghost - a spirit that shows up and haunts a person or place. And almost 20% of those polled believe that they’ve had an encounter with such a ghost. But Laurell Moffatt has…
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A small video caught the eye of Instagramers recently - one involving a whale and a kyak. A drone, hovering over the water at Bondi Beach, captured a person on a kyak paddling away, oblivious to the presence of a whale coasting along directly behind them. Laurel Moffatt reflects on the unique place the humpback whale occupies in Australian waters, …
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Take an ordinary piece of paper. Fold it. Fold it again. Then one more time. Then sit back and observe the beautiful creation you have made. Laurell Moffatt reflects on a life-long love of the Japanese paper art of origami. In it she finds connections to her childhood fascinations and the blueprints for fascinating machines, from the microscopic to…
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Many people learn to play an instrument when they're young. Sadly, most will give it up over time - and many will come to regret it. To become proficient at an instrument means to practise: to keep playing the same rudiments or scales over and over again. Practice is sometimes boring. It's often just an unexciting part of the day. But practice isn'…
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Many of us see the ocean as an immense blue desert; something to be crossed to see loved ones. It covers nearly 140 million square miles of our planet and can seem to many like an unfathomable, stormy tempest. A single drop seems completely insignificant. Perhaps it's for that reason - it's vastness - that we also cast our rubbish into the ocean. B…
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Laurel Moffatt returns with Season 3 of Small Wonders. You're invited to join her on an exploration of the unnoticed and the seemingly unimportant in search of life’s lessons, at the hands of the creator. In this episode, Laurel ponders the wonders of spiders are just that - spiders, through and through. They are what they're made to be, down to th…
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The Grand Canyon. Mount Kilimanjaro. The Fjords of Norway. The endless dunes of the Sahara. Our planet is filled with places that invoke a sense of awe; areas that are beautiful, majestic, and terrifying all at once. Humanity has felt awe since time began - however, awe has only recently been acknowledged by our contemporary world as an emotion. It…
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It’s the challenging times of growth in the leaner months that create a tree's fingerprint, making it possible to find out the name of a shipwreck, reveal the identity, or uncover the truth of the history of a tree.By Laurel Moffatt
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Walking feels good for us because it is good for us. It's not just a luxury, but a necessity for our well-being. This was never more apparent than during the lockdowns of 2020-2021. Walking is mundane but beneficial - both physically, but also for our connection to the world. No matter how momentary or trivial it may seem, bumping into someone on t…
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When we look at the city what do we see? Do we see busyness, progress, and exciting opportunities? Or do we look deeper, and think about the land underneath the glass, concrete, and metal forests we've built? Cities are transient - people ebb and flow into them like the tide. They also pose the question: what is it we're building with our own lives…
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We all want to be productive. To write to-do lists. To clear the inbox. To get things done. We see productivity as critical to growth; if we can harness our productive potential then surely we'll grow richer, stronger, and healthier. But what if our obsession with productivity becomes ... unproductive? Have we forgotten how to let the mind wander? …
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"There is not one little blade of grass, there is no colour in this world that is not intended to make men rejoice." John Calvin Grass is found on every continent on Earth. Over 11,000 species of different grass exist. It's ever-present, but it's easy not to see it at all. How do we see the grass? Is it just a patch out the front of our home? Is it…
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The desire for the good life has never been stronger - and yet, the world and our bodies are surrounded by chemicals that are silently harming us. Medications can be poisonous. Sometimes, the cure is the cause of harm. How do we know if what we're pursuing is turning out for our good? We need to break the chains that prevent us from living a truly,…
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Do we really know who we are? The human heart has two conditions: in and down, or out and up. In and down - seeking the self, or up and out - seeking God. Curves are everywhere - from trees to shells, clouds to hurricanes, and galaxies to black holes - curves are embedded in the universe. Even music follows the shape of a curve. Augustine talks abo…
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"Bird watching isn't just about birds, it's also about those doing the watching ... in watching birds there seems to be a complete lack of idleness." Bird watching takes us to new places. Some watches might travel the world to see rare birds in faraway locations - "slow birders" might just look for birds in their own neighbourhood - but both will d…
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Being able to discern the difference between light and dark is essential for reading. And, this sensitivity is also necessary for navigating our way through many things in daily life. In the first episode of Season 2, Laurel Moffatt explores the wonder of reading - a complex skill that we so commonly take for granted. Dwelling on Augustine - a man …
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Laurel Moffatt returns with Small Wonders - her short, thoughtful reflections on how a trust in Jesus colours how we see things in the world around us. Ahead of a new season, she ponders how, if we don't take the time to pause, we can misunderstand why things are happening the way they are. Things aren't always as they seem - sometimes when we expe…
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For the final episode of season one, Laurel Moffatt drinks in the wonders of water in Zion National Park. The relentless river that flows through the park's centre has carved out a canyon of incredible beauty. But water can have sustaining as well as destructive effects. Laurel investigates the living water that makes an oasis flourish in the midst…
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Laurel Moffatt asks you to focus on what you find easiest to ignore. There are three layers of attention according to former Google strategist, James Williams: Spotlight - that which engages with immediate actions, like finding your socks Starlight - the layer of attention we give to longer-term goals, like getting a degree Daylight - the attention…
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Laurel Moffatt has been to the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde four times. I first ‘saw’ them when I was 16 years old. But not with my eyes. I saw them through reading Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House. An ancient civilization, preserved in stone. The evidence of ordinary, human lives of an ancient culture and the continuity with the past, layers …
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Laurel Moffatt begins her quest for the benefits of doubt at the bottom of the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. There she discovers a search for a lost ship that demonstrates just how necessary uncertainty is to the inquiring mind. The exploration director stated that the Endurance was ‘the most unreachable wreck ever’. And yet, presumably, he had enough…
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Laurel Moffatt considers the universal nature of grief. Many are grieving these days: Illness. Loss of friends, lovers, and family members. The loss of time. The rumbles of war. The question is never whether grief will ever arrive in our life, the question is what to do with it when it does. Mary Delaney, who was born in 1700 to an upper-class fami…
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In the hinterland of Australia's largest island, Laurel Moffatt discovers engineers are hard at work planning a place to story the memory of all our environmental mistakes. The thinking is that our climate is no longer just changing, but headed for disaster. And if our planet's going to crash, survivors will need to know what happened and why, and …
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Rustic. Refined. Cutesy. Elegant. Modern. Traditional. No matter your tastes, there’s a place to suit you in today's online rental market. What you probably don't go looking for, though, is a person who comes with dream destination. Laurel Moffatt examines the boom in the short-term rental economy which has had a perverse effect on the life of the …
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How is it that significant moments in your childhood can sit so close to people and places you'd rather forget? Laurel Moffatt says that people who say they don't believe in ghosts never met her grandmother. She is haunted by the memory of a woman who actively destroyed everything around her. But the set of instructions she taught Laurel for washin…
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Laurel Moffatt takes a trip down to the mighty Mississippi River. There, she discovers something that demands respect. What else do you owe a thing that can both divide a continent and bring you directly into its heart? That can both float a ship and sink it? But it is also a place to contemplate our efforts to control the world around us. Here, we…
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The Joshua Tree National Park in California is a good starting place for Laurel Moffatt's reflection on our struggles to see the light. The park is full of interesting characters as well as a compelling number of stars - most of which are invisible to the outside world. Because of the amount of artificial light we use each night, more than a third …
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Laurel is a writer of essays with a background in English literature and a habit of researching the overlooked and undervalued, the big and the small things around us. Follow her as she asks of it all, how would a trust in Jesus Christ - if we could find our way to that - affect what we see? How we see?…
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