A Familiar Kind of Wonder

At the Lucas Museum, it was the garden that first brought me back to myself.

Yoda stood there to welcome me: a familiar figure in a place I was encountering for the first time. Seeing him in that setting stirred something I couldn’t immediately explain. Here was a character who belonged to an imagined world, suddenly sharing space with me. I could approach him, move around him, see him against a landscape.

For a moment, the distance between childhood and the present felt very small.

The space itself made me feel small, too. Greenery gathered around the building’s sweeping forms, softening their meeting with the ground. I felt myself looking outward and upward, trying to take it in. Alongside that smallness came an unexpected feeling of activation. I was curious. Emotionally awake. Something familiar had surfaced before I had the words for it.

I’ve been trying to understand that combination ever since: feeling quiet and intensely alive at the same time.

In Los Angeles, I often experience space through its usefulness. A place to meet someone, make something, get somewhere. Even a beautiful setting can become another item in the day, somewhere I visit with a purpose already attached. I arrive knowing what I’m supposed to do.

Here, my attention had somewhere to wander.

Beneath the building, a circular opening framed the blue sky. The surface overhead curved toward it, drawing my gaze up to the glass-lined level where other visitors were visible. There were people above me, people crossing the plaza, and greenery close by. I was standing within the city, yet the view felt strange enough to loosen my sense of where I was.

I found myself looking up and feeling both grounded and elsewhere.

Inside, that curiosity followed the glass elevators. I watched them travel through the building, carrying people between levels. Their movement made the height tangible. From where I stood, I could see a small part of someone else’s journey and imagine what waited beyond my view.

I wanted to follow them.

The library offered another kind of invitation. Curved wooden shelves rose around communal tables beneath a softly glowing oval in the ceiling. Books filled the room’s edges; people occupied its center, sitting together, reading, looking around.

Its scale held my attention, but so did its familiarity. There were chairs to pull up and pages to turn. After all that looking upward, here was somewhere to sit. The many worlds suggested by the shelves felt within reach.

Moving through these spaces, I began to recognize what Yoda had stirred at the beginning. His presence brought a piece of childhood into the world I occupy now, with all its adult expectations and explanations. I found myself wondering how much of that younger self remains available to me. How often do I give him somewhere to go?

What surfaced wasn’t a clear memory. I couldn’t locate it in a particular afternoon or point to a scene from a film and say, That’s what I’m remembering. It was more elusive: an unknown but familiar memory, a feeling I recognized without being able to place.

Perhaps I was remembering a way of seeing.

As a child, I could become absorbed by the possibility of a place. Something above me, a passage into another room, a familiar character encountered unexpectedly—all could hold my attention before I understood why. At the museum, I felt some of that willingness return. I could remain curious without deciding immediately what an experience meant.

That seems meaningful at a museum devoted to storytelling. Stories become part of us. Their characters accompany us, gathering associations we may barely notice until an encounter brings them forward. A familiar figure can still reach a version of ourselves we haven’t thought about in years.

The museum gave me time to notice that happening.

I think of meditation here as a willingness to stay with that feeling. To stand beneath an opening and look at the sky. To watch an elevator long enough to become absorbed by its movement. To sit among books and let my attention settle.

What stays with me is the possibility that a place can make an earlier version of ourselves accessible again. I arrived as an adult, carrying the day with me. Somewhere between the garden and the library, I felt a child’s capacity for wonder stir.

I wanted to give him time to explore.