New Book in the Works
A work in progress, updated frequently
Slightly Drunk on Wonder
By Patrick Costello
For Aunt Mannie
Copyleft 2026
While copyright is not necessarily a bad thing, some ideas need to be free.
Use this book and these words. Share them. Copy them. Make your own printings and give it away. Rewrite, repurpose, and reuse. It’s okay.
I love you.
-Patrick
Introduction
Well, hello there.
It’s okay. You can say hello right back. Silently in your mind or out loud to startle people around you. Don’t worry if somebody might hear. To be honest, some of the most interesting conversations I ever had were with people talking to themselves on the bus or subway.
We are meeting in an unusual way. I am writing in my world and now, miles and years away, as you are reading, your mind will conjure its own version of my voice.
That’s the astonishing thing about reading and writing. We will likely never meet, but we are now connected. You might not hear the thick Philadelphia Delco accent of my speaking voice, but you are hearing me just the same. By writing, I have set things into motion like a pebble tossed into a still pond. The ripples never truly stop.
Now comes the question of why. Why am I writing this? Why are you reading?
I am writing because I want to share an observation with you. Not some gospel or great truth—just an observation I picked up as a child that has guided me through my long life. Your reasons for reading my words are your own.
My observation is this: you are surrounded by wonder.
Every second of your life, you are surrounded by amazing things. Beauty and horror. Sunshine and shadow. There is not one moment, from your greatest achievement to your most harrowing defeat, that does not contain countless things that, if you stop long enough to see, will leave you staggering—slightly drunk on wonder.
Don’t believe me? Just step outside and look around. Wherever you live, in the city or in the rural countryside, there is life moving around you. People are moving about chasing hopes and dreams. Wildlife is going about its business, from urban pigeons to herds of deer, to the silent growth of grass out in the field or forcing its way through cracks in the sidewalk.
Even you are a miracle if you sit still long enough to really take yourself in.
It’s easy to scoff at the idea you might be special. From birth, we find ourselves under constant comparison and critique. As children, the people who raise us tend to program us with their views of the world. As a result, many of us grow to see ourselves as less than we truly are. We end up rushing about trying to fit in and please people and, as a result, we lose ourselves.
We are strangers right now, but I can tell you honestly and with full confidence that you are amazing. From the creation of the universe eons ago to right now, there has never been anybody like you. There will never be anybody like you.
I am a musician who just happens to be deaf as a post. In the forty years I was playing and teaching around the world, people would watch me perform and say that it was easy for me—using “magical thinking” words like talent to explain my music away. As if I woke up one day and took up the banjo and country blues guitar with no effort.
The comedy is that I was godawful when I started. I was so terrible in the beginning that my attempts at music were so clumsily toneless that it started to kill my neighbor’s lawn. Conductive hearing loss forced me to use my teeth to hear my instruments, with the vibrations rattling through my skull to reach the auditory nerves. Learning disabilities made sight-reading written music almost impossible. Lack of coordination made fretting or striking strings clumsy and out of time. I became proficient and eventually mastered my craft because, as awful as I was, I loved the music too much to quit. That love inspired me to work and eventually find my way to the unconscious grace that only comes through hard work and repetition.
I am not gifted in any way, just stubbornly in love.
This is not a matter of philosophy or religion. Fancy people will always complicate things with categories and other busyness. This is just about work. Applied effort as we learn to see and experience the world around us plainly for the playground it truly is.
In this book, I won’t be teaching or lecturing you. There will be no quotes cut and pasted from wiser writers and there will be no definitive philosophical terms. Instead, I want this to be a conversation. Imagine the two of us on a picnic or walking together down a country lane. All I want is for you to see. To see yourself and the amazing world around you. To realize that you can accomplish things beyond your imagination. That anything is possible with stubbornness and love. To take part in the dance rather than to berate yourself as a wallflower.
Take my hand. There is so much to see and to do and to be. You don’t have to believe in yourself right now. I believe in you.
Come on. Let’s talk about wildflowers.
Wildflowers
You can learn everything you need to know from a wildflower.
Yeah, I know. That sounds like I spent the last fifty years in a VW microbus living on ‘shrooms and following Grateful Dead tribute bands across the Midwest, living by selling macrame and sculptures made from toenail clippings. A lot of the old wisdom fell into trite catchphrases through well-intentioned overuse by souls grasping for wisdom like a man stumbling in the dark. That makes us cynical when it comes to simple truths.
Still, there is much to learn from wildflowers.
The thing about wildflowers is that they don’t care where they grow. There is no cultivation, landscape architecture, aesthetics, or planning involved. The seed is dropped by wind or wildlife, and it grows. Think about that for a second. To be completely helpless—carried by currents you cannot understand to a place fair or foul and finding a way to grow, bloom, and spread. That, my friend, is power—and perhaps wisdom.
Whenever I begin something, there is always a moment when I hesitate, wondering if there may be a better place or time to start work. As if taking that first step requires some optimal setting that will ensure success. Telling myself that I am not procrastinating, just waiting for a sunnier or cooler day. As if the chaos of my everyday life will drop away, creating some golden hour where my dreams will come true and my schedule will clear itself.
When this happens, I think about wildflowers.
When I was a child, I never thought about the flowers growing all over rural Chester County, Pennsylvania. Back in the 1970s, it was a beautiful and dangerous place. The infamous Kiddie Gang, subjects of the wildly inaccurate crime noir At Close Range, were both menacing my father and trying to recruit me. I knew Robin Miller, the teenage girl they murdered in cold blood.
Robin called me Tiger. She would tousle my hair and fuss over me every time she came into dad’s hoagie shop, always in the wake of Bruce Johnston Jr. and the rest of the Kiddie gang. I’d watch the group huddled around the Asteroids machine, guns sticking out of their waistbands. I never understood why she was drawn to such violent men. Robin was a ray of light. Fifty years later, I still cry for her.
To escape the Kiddie Gang and the other violence that hung over the village of Marshallton like a shroud, I would often run to the woods and hedgerow, escaping the struggles at home and soaking in the loveliness of the landscape. The wildflowers were something that decorated the scenery. Pretty, but so abundant I took them for granted.
When I was seven, my mother started spinning and dyeing fleece for wealthy landowners in the area. I was put to work helping her prepare the raw wool for her spinning wheel. Then, I was sent out to gather natural dyes—wandering the woods gathering great baskets of specific plants to conjure pigments to color the spun yarn. Jewelweed, Joe-Pye weed, sage, and sassafras.
After the hours of searching for and gathering the wild plants for the dyes, my mother and I would begin the hard work at the dye pots. Cooking down bushels of herbs into dyes. Soaking the yarn in mordant before the careful process of dyeing the yarn. It sounds simple, but breaking down these raw materials into consistent coloring took great skill and patience—something Mom had in abundance.
The work was brutal. Hours and hours picking burrs from the fleece while mom labored at the spinning wheel. Our hands slick with lanolin. The dye pots overloading the house with the herbaceous scent of the dyes and wet wool. The trial and error of getting vat after vat of dye a consistent color. All of our hard work only paying a pittance, and every penny we earned was desperately needed.
Because of this, I started to view wildflowers as blocks of the colors I could draw from them. The work had altered my perspective from background decorations into something useful, even purposeful.
As I grew older, wildflowers brought nostalgia. The fear of my childhood and the violence of the Kiddie Gang and other threats of that time and place were thick as mud. Sitting by my mother’s spinning wheel became a refuge. The rhythm of her foot on the treadle. The rough resistance as I carded the raw wool. The thorns and briars against my skin as I harvested dyes and the stink of the dye pot mixed with wet yarn. My mother would sing hymns as she worked the wheel, and I would lean against her to feel the rumble of her voice. I loved her more than chocolate, and wildflowers still bring those warm memories rushing back to me as irresistible as the tide.
Then, as life will do, I grew older. While wildflowers brought the light and darkness of my past forward in my memory, I began to learn other things from the flowers growing along the road.
You see, a wildflower doesn’t choose where to grow. It simply blooms where it is planted. There is no choice involved. The seed is scattered by wind or wildlife and, once settled, takes root and blooms against all odds. Whether it’s in a sunny embankment or fighting its way through the cracks in the pavement, it finds a way to flourish as best it can.
While we appreciate the color and majesty of the bloom—unless it is a dandelion in our supposedly perfect green lawn—and maybe even find utility in wildflowers for things like dyes or floral arrangements, wildflowers are not growing for us. There is no intentionality or purpose. They grow for themselves. To bloom, then wither and become scattered seeds so that more life can begin.
It is easy to fall prey to the illusion we are the main character—that the flowers dotting a field are for our enjoyment, that the lives moving about us are extras on a set. To view the world in terms of our own aesthetics and utility to our needs. Many of the angry and unhappy people who cross our paths are operating under this mistaken perspective. We fall for the philosophical trap of waiting for the right place, the right job, the right person, the right time, and all of that other noise. Forgetting that sometimes choice is a luxury, and we are often faced with the hard choice of blooming where we are planted or not growing at all.
Just as a Black-eyed Susan has no choice in having thimbleweed or purple aster growing next to it, we lack the same options in the people who surround us. Every life around you is dealing with its own hardships and joys. No matter the burdens you may carry, every person you meet is in the grip of battles you cannot fathom. Just as wildflowers are not here for our enjoyment, your neighbors are not there to facilitate anything for your benefit. It is up to each of us to be open beyond our own needs and desires and find the will and the strength to help others, if they are willing, find a way to bloom. You can literally save or change a life with things like a warm smile or offering a cup of coffee.
When I was a teenager, I used to skip school and busk on the sidewalks and subways of Philadelphia. It was a way for me to both practice and find teachers. Sometimes musicians with far greater skills than my own would sit down next to me and offer an impromptu lesson right on the spot—how to form a chord, how to find a scale, and even how to play the boogie shuffle on the guitar. Other times, the rough police of that place and time would beat me senseless and rob me. There were a few times when all I could do was wrap myself in the fetal position, protecting my guitar or banjo as officers kicked my ribs in, raided my case for money, and even stole my smokes.
The violence always came as a jolt. They would creep up behind me and knock me senseless with a brutal elbow drop to the shoulder. Not that much different from a rabbit grazing in a meadow, suddenly finding itself in the talons of a hawk. The explosiveness of that kind of encounter is not something you can prepare for, and fighting back would only have made it worse.
But playing on the street was where I got my musical education. I chalked up the lumps as the price of tuition.
After those police beatdowns, I couldn’t go to my parents and tell them I skipped school. So, I would wander to my Aunt Mannie’s house. Mannie would doctor me up and feed me the best grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup you ever tasted. Then she would take me by the hand and lead me to church. She would have me light a candle for each police officer who rolled me that day, and one extra for the women they go home to.
The first time we did this, it felt silly. An empty gesture against a cold world. Over time, I slowly realized what Mannie was teaching me: unconditional love mixed with a deeper insight into the underappreciated ripples our lives can carry forward. Forgiving the men who beat me was one thing. Thinking of the other lives around them, the damage they do, lighting a candle for the spouse facing that brutality on an inescapable daily basis was another thing entirely. It forced a change in my perspective—to see my tormentors beyond their impact on me and become aware not only that they generated a radius of pain, but that some injury or misinterpreted lesson made them that way.
I think of Mannie and her hard lessons when I look at wildflowers. Mannie wasn’t really my aunt. She was a cousin so distant we were barely related. She chose to love me for reasons I cannot understand any more than a seed can fathom why it ended up in a field or cracked parking lot. The only matter of choice involved was for me to accept that love and flourish under it. She had nothing, but always something to share. I loved her more than music.
When Mannie died, my father came with me to her funeral. He said he had to pay his respects to this tiny giant of a woman. At the service, he leaned into her coffin and whispered something in her ear. Later, I built up the nerve to ask him what he said.
“I thanked her for being good to my son.”
Like a wildflower, we have no choice where to bloom. Carried by gentle winds or dropped in dung, it is up to every living thing to find a way to thrive where we are planted. The conditions are not always ideal, but sometimes hardships provide the opportunity to develop stronger roots or learn hard lessons so deep they can only be revealed through difficulty. Being deaf made it harder to become a musician, but it also forced me to appreciate every note. Getting stomped on the subway in Philly was awful, but it also made me aware of just how important street art can be to lonely people going about their day. Between the beatings, I had some profound encounters. It wasn’t just some random person dropping a dollar in my case; I was defiantly creating something beautiful—something that made people smile, made mothers dance their babies on their knee, or brought back distant memories of family singing on the front porch.
The lack of control I speak of—that unintentionality of events that carry us, plant us, and generate the conditions in which we grow—is something I have repeated a few times now, but I cannot stress the importance of understanding this enough. We so easily fall into the illusion of control, believing that we can plan for any adversity, and it is nothing but fooling ourselves. Build a fireproof house with a bomb shelter and it can still be knocked down by an earthquake. Study hard in school, go into debt for a higher education, and graduate just as the job market drops like a rock. Things just happen, and much of it is beyond our control. You can drive yourself crazy trying to plan every step of your journey before starting, only to trip and break your ankle on your doorstep. Being aware of this, it would be easy to get fatalistic—but I find it freeing. There is an old saying that goes, “If you don’t care where you are, you ain’t lost.” It’s hilarious, but also deeply true. It is far better to let life take you where you need to go and allow yourself to grow.
Growth is rarely easy, and no life is entirely free of pain. That pain can shape us, bend our stems, or lead us to striking a kid playing for change on the curb. The only thing we can control is how we use that pain and allow it to shape or distort our actions. Love is an overwhelming force, but forgiveness and kindness are choices.
There is also the matter of ripples beyond our actions. The wildflower blooms unaware of the bees and butterflies pollinating it, and those pollinators are oblivious to the hardships of the bloom. Just as I could not know the memories my music on the streets revived in passersby, each of us goes about giving and receiving unconsciously through our day. Holding the door for the person behind you. Offering a smile to a stranger when we make eye contact. Being patient with the customer ahead of us in line. Everything impacts everything, and the more aware we are of that, the easier it becomes to choose love over impatience.
If you consciously choose love long enough, it stops being a voluntary action and becomes a natural reflex. The choice and formality drop away and there is nothing except love—direct from the heart and stronger than a double espresso. The power of Aunt Mannie’s love for me, for the police who hurt me, and for the women they went home to, was not that it was some kind of conscious action. The power was in the sheer lack of any thought or decision. It was not something she did to please people or teach a lesson. It was not a workaround to get a better spot in heaven. It was, as unbelievable as it sounds, nothing but love. I was a trained fighter, but Mannie was far more powerful and formidable because she operated from pure love.
One thing to bear in mind with this wildflower analogy is that we are not always stuck in bad situations. We can spread our roots. We can find ways to escape unkind situations and find new places to grow and flourish. Branching out to a place where the sun shines a little brighter or kinder.
The seed loves to sprout. The sprout loves to grow. The plant loves to bloom. The bloom loves the bee. A natural flowing progression we can each embrace, even when it comes time to release and go to seed. This is love. This is power and redemption and grace. This is everything.
With all of these lessons to ponder from something as simple as wildflowers, it is easy to forget the simple fact of their beauty.
I mean, just stop and look. Aren’t they pretty?