Indeed, there's an aspect of childhood we ought to hold onto, the appreciation of wonder. Jadedness and wonder pull us in opposite directions, depending on whether we're humble or objective enough to set aside our preconceptions now and again, to appreciate the strangeness of what's happening--because everything's perfectly strange in the cosmic context (because it's something rather than nothing).

That poem would have worked well in the article. I don't know about that last phrase, though, "natural piety." It might get at a worthy kind of pantheism, but "piety" has some rotten connotations.