The 5,000 or so pages that comprise the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci—some loose, some bound, held in various collections around the world—were largely never intended for publication. Covered with studies for larger works, shopping and to-do lists, personal reflections, mathematical formulas, obsessive geometry puzzles, anatomical drawings, depictions of turbulent waves or clouds, faces of angels and monsters, treaties on flight and painting, designs for bridges and fantastical machines, they are an unselfconscious manifestation of a singular consciousness. This little piece of theatre is one attempt to embody a small fraction of the notebooks: aside from a brief scene between two imaginary Florentine ladies, every word was written by Leonardo himself.

I made my first iteration of The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci when I was 29. I’m 62 now, and the marvel has only grown. It is tempting to think of Leonardo (and, in a way, to dismiss him) as entirely sui generis, a different sort of creature, not quite human, an incomprehensible genius with a preternaturally large brain. I don’t think that. I think that the genius of Leonardo lies not in his being inhumanly intelligent, but rather in his ability to remain awake to the world his entire life, from childhood to the day he died. When we are very young, we are astonished by the natural world and ask all sorts of questions about it all day long; but eventually most of us become habituated, or we give up on our ability to understand; or, somehow, in the face of overwhelming mystery and beauty, we grow bored. Leonardo never did. To borrow Mary Oliver’s wishful phrase, he lived his entire life as a “bride to amazement.” So drawn was he to apprehending the mechanism of the “terrestrial machine” (that manifests equally in the motions of the planets, the blood, the wings of a bird, or the gestures of an orator) that neither scientific nor artistic means alone would suffice: he must use both. And these two ways of knowing—or devotion—informed each other: his scientific explorations made him a more accurate painter, and the prolonged attention to the subject as it actually is that painting demands improved his observational powers as a scientist. For Leonardo, knowledge was not a dissolution of enchantment but a precursor to it. As he wrote in a corner of one of the 5,000 pages of the notebooks, “Great love comes from great knowledge of the beloved object; and if you know it little, you can love it little, or not at all.”

Anytime you find yourself suddenly arrested by some aspect of natural phenomena, noticing the lengthening of shadow in the late afternoon, the intensity of green on the leaves, the iridescence of a little insect making its way across the floor, or how the light in winter is radiant due to its reflection off the snow, anytime you fall out of your busyness and attend to the wonder of the world, that is the Leonardo in you. That is your Leonardo-ness. We all have that within us.