Amazement Break 1
Photo from Gerry Images
January 11, 2026
Sometimes the weight of the world feels so great, it’s as if iron, rather than blood, surges in our veins. The trials of our own lives, the terrible circumstances suffered by so many people in so many places, the battering of the Earth, the crisis of morality in the United States…. are we even justified in wishing for a moment of reprieve?
Yes, I say, and yes again. How else can we stay sane and carry on if we can’t experience, now and then, beauty, awe, and delight?
I came across the information below this morning in the book I’m reading, One Midsummer’s Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth by Mark Cocker. My reaction of gratitude and joy immediately made me decide that, every now and then, I’m going to send you some wonderful fact about life on Earth.
I’m calling these offerings AMAZEMENT BREAKS, for they will, I hope, give us a little break from sorrow, anxiety, and despair.
So, this is from Cocker:
“In the Archean eon [4-2.5 billion years ago] at the dawn of the biosphere, microbes, especially photosynthesising marine bacteria, started to generate immense quantities of oxygen as a waste product of their food-generating processes. Gradually that oxygen rose and accumulated, atom by atom, to envelop the Earth in an immense protective overcoat.”
That “protective overcoat” is the ozone layer, formed from the waste products of the first live beings on the planet. Part of the miracle-making process of life on Earth.
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