SMALL WONDERS A FIELD GUIDE TO LIFE’S QUIET JOYS By Jennifer Shoop: Excerpt
Find happiness and comfort in life’s everyday moments with this insightful visual volume of prose and poetry.
In our busy and stress-filled world, it’s easy to miss the smaller moments that can provide happiness and fulfilment. Small Wonders is your invitation to slow down and savor the minor miracles of everyday living. With her insightful prose and evocative poetry, author Jennifer Shoop celebrates the little moments that connect us to each other and to the world around us. Dreamy photography brings the text to life, showcasing the beauty found in the often-overlooked, mundane details all around us.
Author Jennifer Shoop (@magpiebyjenshoop), creator of the literary lifestyle publication Magpie, encourages you to find joy and replenishment in the small stuff, such as:
- A long phone call with a friend
- The dance of backyard fireflies
- The well-worn charm of a beloved hand-me-down
- And more.
Wherever you are on your path, life’s small wonders can nurture your soul.
We are delighted to feature this excerpt!
“Let the Earth Belong to the Earth” by Jennifer Shoop
The first few years after we planted ourselves in Bethesda, my husband went to war with the chipmunks and squirrels and birds who determinedly decimated his garden beds and fruit trees. The raspberries would be on the eve of picking, and he’d find them absent in the morning, or—worse yet—barely nibbled and spat out, round insults left in the soil. We never once got a cherry; the birds were too fleet-winged.
Ever the dutiful engineer, my husband devised any number of innovations to deter their larceny. Sprays, nets, wire caging. When one late-summer day he found a bird dead in the webbing, having trapped itself there in its flailing attempt at escape, he buried it and then gave up. He let the earth belong to the earth.
There is a beautiful poem by Mary Oliver titled “Backyard.” In it, she describes a yard left to its own devices—a knotting copse of litter and leaves. In spite of her compulsion to tidy the eyesore, she concludes: “but the birds loved it.”
There are many places that do not need our tampering hands. Let us leave the brushwood and chaparral to its own wild will. I am thinking of our garden beds, but also of my children and their easy ways of being: my son watching a movie while draped at odd angles on the couch; my daughter leaving her hair wavy and uncultivated; their squinting, silly jokes and exaggerated noises. There is nothing to correct, I remind myself. Let them be those little backyard thickets.
I am thinking of my own writing, too. Editing is one thing, but may I always make room for the unexpected. May I not be drawn to tame the weirdness out. Sometimes I weedwack my way through a dense spinney of words only to realize that the cultivated version is less appealing to the nest-building mind. Not everything is best pared back; the imagination thrives in shadowlands, or at least in spaces with many branches from which to fly.
When I went birding in Colorado last summer, the guide told us that, when looking for birds, a good place to start is on the barest branch toward the top of a tree, as birds like a good view—for hunting, for visibility. We craned our necks and found a raptor on the one craggy branch extending at an odd angle from the pine. That crooked limb made the perfect perch.
Let the wild heart beat where it likes.
—
Excerpted from SMALL WONDERS © 2026 by Jennifer Shoop. Reprinted with permission from Rock Point, an imprint of The Quarto Group. All rights reserved.
Jennifer Shoop (@magpiebyjenshoop) is the creator of Magpie, the literary lifestyle publication and platform that inspires women to live thoughtful, well-curated lives, inviting self-discovery. Magpie features a daily blog with an engaged readership covering a wide range of lifestyle topics, including motherhood, friendship, love, literature, and beyond. Jennifer holds an advanced degree in literature from Georgetown University and resides in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband and two children. Her debut book Small Wonders: A Field Guide to Life’s Quiet Joys is available wherever books are sold. To learn more please visit: www.magpiebyjenshoop.com
Category: On Writing
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
