LIVING WITH MYSTERY - WALKING IN WONDER

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about mystery.  In particular, I have been thinking about what the Irish mystic and poet John O’Donohue called “the mystery of being here.”

And, because I have three baby granddaughters, born within six months of each other, I have also been thinking about the fact that when we are very young, we simply accept the circumstances into which we are born – the shape and size and feel of our parents and others who care for us; the four walls of our home; the toys on our floor.  There are tasks to attend to – we must learn to sit up, to crawl, to walk, to talk.  These tasks are all-consuming.  The present is all there is.  

At this stage, as far as I know, we aren’t capable of thinking about the mystery of being here; we are, instead, experiencing the wonder of being here.  Each new thing or person we encounter is an amazement.  We are dazzled.

And then at some point the questions begin.  First come the answerable questions (even if one must resort to Google), such as:

Why is the sky blue?

What is snow?

Then come answerable questions that require a bit of finesse.   Here are a couple asked by a daughter of mine before age four:

How did I get out of the baby tummy?

How did I get into the baby tummy?

(I did answer these honestly.)

Then come the questions asked just before bedtime, when you really want to go to sleep.  Here is a further sample from a daughter, aged maybe 12:  What was the Vietnam war about, anyway?

And, eventually, along come the cosmic questions:

Where did we come from?

Why are we here?

Why do we suffer?

Why do we die

What happens when we die?

At first the cosmic questions take up a lot of space, at least, for me, they did.  But here’s the thing -- the older I get, the more comfortable I am with mystery, the more willing I am to accept the questions as being unanswerable.  

I am deeply perplexed by claims to certain answers to any of these questions.  I do not understand such certainty.  Where does it come from?  The poet Mary Oliver speaks for me on this subject:

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous

 to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the

 mouths of the lambs.

How rivers and stones are forever

In allegiance with gravity

 while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds will 

 never be broken

How people come, from delight or the 

 scars of damage,

to the comfort of a poem.

 

Let me keep my distance, always, from those 

 who think they have the answers.

 

Let me keep company always with those who say 

 "Look!" and laugh in astonishment, 

 and bow their heads.

 

It’s true, I do have some intuitions about the cosmic questions; you might even say I have faith in my intuitions.  Still, I do not lay claim to any certainties.  And I have no interest in trying to convince anyone that my intuitions are correct.  (Let me add that I am as uncomfortable with atheistic certainty—what I call unholier than thou – as I am with religious certainty.)  

 

A number of years ago, I read the book Leaving Church:  A Memoir of Faith by the Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor.  She recounted that several of her parishioners had come to her, struggling with questions of belief, and she began to realize that she was more interested in beholding than believing.

 

Beholding.  I like that word.  It allows for mystery.  It allows for wonder.  

 

Here's the thing about certainty; it cuts off curiosity at its knees.  Certainty is a hardening of our ideas, a shutting down of the possibility that there is another way of looking at things.  Acceptance of mystery allows for curiosity, for expansiveness, for taking in new ideas, for the possibility of harkening back to the wonder of our earliest years. 

 

I return to the wisdom of John O’ Donohue:

 

Awaken to the mystery of being here 

and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence. 

Have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.

Receive encouragement when new frontiers beckon. 

Respond to the call of your gift and the courage to follow its           path...

May your outer dignity mirror an inner dignity of soul. 

May you take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention...

May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.

  

As we begin this new year, may we each awaken to, and accept, the mystery of being here.  And may we, with O'Donohue and my granddaughters, behold all that is around us “as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.”

                                   Photo by Guillermo Ferla on Unsplash

ANOTHER NEW YEAR -- MAY IT BE KIND

It has been another exhausting year.  Covid has continued to circulate, even as climate change has become ever more difficult to ignore, bringing terrible heat here to the Pacific Northwest and fires, tornados, floods, and drought elsewhere.  

There have been blessings, of course.  A new baby born to one of my two daughters, and the other daughter looking forward to the birth of twins next spring.  There have been days spent with friends and family and hours spent in my garden.  There have been walks and writing projects and books to read.  

 

There has been love and there has been sorrow.

 

It is difficult to know how to approach this next year, which will bring the start of year three of our living with the virus, along with everyday blessings in each of our lives.  So, because I haven’t the words for my wish that the new year will be kind to us all, and because the Irish mystic John O’Donohue left us so many beautiful words, I give you his Blessing For The New Year from his book, To Bless the Space Between Us:

 

BEANACHT (A Blessing For the New Year)

 

On the day when

The weight deadens

On your shoulders

And you stumble, 

May the clay dance

To balance you.

 

And when your eyes

Freeze behind

The gray window 

And the ghost of loss

Gets into you,

May a flock of colors, 

Indigo, red, green

And azure blue,

Come to awaken in you

A meadow of delight.

 

When the canvas frays

In the curraagh of thought

And a stain of ocean

Blackens beneath you,

May there come across the waters

A path of yellow moonlight

To bring you safely home.

 

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

May the clarity of light be yours,

May the fluency of the ocean be yours,

May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

 

And so may a slow

Wind work these words

Or love around you,

An invisible cloak 

To mind your life.

 

                                

As we enter this new year, may your joys outweigh your sorrows and may you have an invisible cloak to mind your life. 

SOME THOUGHTS ON BEAUTY

  “Because our present habit of mind is governed by the calculus of consumerism and busyness, we are less and less frequently available to the exuberance of beauty."

              -   John O'Donohue

Lately I have been thinking about beauty.  Noticing it everywhere.  Of course, one needn’t look far to find beauty at this time of year.  Even though some plants and trees were burned during the recent heat wave, there are yet many bright green leaves and vibrant flowers.   Indeed, I have recently spent long moments just standing in front of my garden taking in the sights and smells and bird song.  Nearly drowning in the beauty of it all.

But this is not what I want to write about today. Instead, I want to talk about human beauty.  

A week or two ago, while indulging in my first post-pandemic pedicure, I was arrested by the beauty of the young woman taking care of my feet.  She couldn’t have been a day over twenty. And she was lovely.  Long black hair, smooth skin, beautiful eyes.  

The feeling wasn’t personal.  It was like the feeling you get when standing in front of a beautiful piece of art.  Or a just-opening flower.

I was tempted to say, “Do you have any idea how lovely you are?

I didn’t, of course.  And it is likely that she, as is the case with so many young women, was insecure about her appearance and would not have known what I was talking about.  Certainly, if I was lovely at twenty, I didn’t know it.  (Now, I believe one has to work hard not to present as lovely or handsome at that unspoiled age, but you couldn’t have convinced me of that then.  As the song says, “youth is wasted on the young.”)

I found this young woman’s beauty poignant because I knew it would not last--not, at least, in this form.  As with a flower, her budding beauty would change as her life unfolded.  She might one day be a good-looking middle-aged woman and after that a handsome older woman.  But, for now, she was the epitome of beautiful youth.  

In truth, though, it is not generally the beauty of extreme youth that draws my eye. The faces of those in their twenties are a little too smooth.   I more greatly appreciate those in their thirties and forties.  They have a little more life behind them, a little more experience written on their faces. 

And why do we, in this youth-worshipping culture persist in believing that beauty ends by middle age?  There is beauty in the face of a fifty or sixty-year-old.  Life has laid down a few lines, but a smile can light up the most ordinary of middle-aged faces.

And what of those over seventy -- the cohort I have recently joined?  I see so much beauty in the faces of my friends.  It is the beauty of a life well-lived, of traumas outlived, of wisdom gained.  

It is a beauty etched by laughter and sorrow. 

Sadly, I was not able to see this beauty when I was very young.  I remember a day in my mid 20s, standing with a friend decades older than I, watching a woman of perhaps 60, who was running across an intersection.  My friend, who was constantly expressing joy, turned to me and exclaimed, "Would you look at that old girl!"  These were not words of disparagement.  He was grinning broadly in appreciation.  Although I could not then see what he was seeing, I see it now in retrospect.  The woman was smiling -- full of life.  She was exuding what the poet and mystic John O'Donohue called "the exuberance of beauty."**

There is much written on a face and it is, I think, a terrible thing to attempt to cover or arrest the signs of age on one’s visage.  I don’t mean we should subject ourselves to direct sunlight or throw away our face creams.  I just mean there is beauty in a lived-in face.  Not the untouched beauty of a twenty-year-old face, but beauty nonetheless.  To undergo, say, a facelift is to erase a life.  In any event, no one is fooled.

I recently noticed when looking in a mirror, that the sides of my face wrinkle when I smile.  I'll admit this was briefly disconcerting, but you’d better believe I’m not going to stop smiling in order to present the illusion of smooth skin.  

I’m going to keep smiling and I’m going to appreciate the beauty of those around me, whatever their age, size, shape, or color.  For when we smile, the beauty of our spirits shine through, no matter our age or presentation.

                                                            Photo by Janaya Dasiuk on Unsplash

                                                           Photo by John Moeses Bauan on Unsplash  

 ** I know some might be offended by the term "old girl." I probably would be if it were applied to me now.  But my friend was a man of his time and place and his delight in the woman's exuberance of beauty was so very clear.