Mystery

Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery. . . . Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That's what makes it mystery.
~ Gregory Maguire, from Son of a Witch
(quotes in the following text are from the same source)

Dad used to say, after making a pronouncement that was completely arguable, "It's the truth," and he'd give me a squinty-eyed look that invited me to contradict him, which I started to do in 1961 when I was 15 and the Civil Rights movement was heating up. I can remember shouting matches in the living room, in the kitchen, in the car. And we didn't stop our shouting until I stopped challenging him on what he called "the truth." I was probably 60 at the time, and I could say that he was darned good at triggering me - which was true - but I also see that I was just as stubborn as he was, and I knew I was right.

Can two people be right when their opinions are so divergent that one of them must surely be wrong?

I like to think that as I get older, I become more willing to not know, to just float on the mystery. But as I said, I was 60 before I gave up rising to Dad's challenge. I could see that the more Dad knew "for sure," the less he was likely to understand. And from there, I saw that "understanding" is just a big fat lie.

Everything said something, and it wasn't her job to consider the merit or even the meaning of the message: just to witness the fact of the message.

A few years ago there was a short-lived TV drama that I forget the name of that was about a group of college students who all have a special gift, like ESP or seeing ghosts, that sort of thing. One of them read the world - literally read the world in the various random ways that messages come to us in words: graffiti sprayed on a fence, a pink flyer announcing open mic night, headlines in a newspaper, an ad on a bus. All of these words came together in his mind as an important message. I remember being fascinated with this idea. Have you ever been reading a newspaper, say, and you see a word like "substantiation" just as the radio announcer says that word?

. . . though far below them they delighted in spectacle of wild tsebra [zebra] wheeling and cantering in their winter migration toward the south, a flurry of black and white markings against the brown ground, an alphabet in the act of writing the story of tsebra migration.

We can conjure a meaning of Life in the metaphor of a flower, from seedling to new growth to lush, full, blossom, and finally to fading and falling and crumbling to compost. But what about this? What if the compost stage is middle age? And what if we come into a second blossoming - should the seeds of the old fall just right? Couldn't I, at 60, have finally come to the end of my knowing only to start the new growth process all over again by not knowing? I'm 66 now, and I have no doubt that I know less now than I did yesterday, and it's a great relief to not know. There's a rightness to it that is so much more satisfying than arguing the finer points of all those things Dad was so certain about.

What if death comes when we are in the fullness of the mystery? Ripe, lush, and open to reading whatever the universe has to tell us?  I'm willing to read the birds in flight to see what they have to say.

Comments

[Robin Song]

Here is the dot theory of "knowing"...

With a pencil put a dot on a piece of paper.
Say - "This is what I know".
Then draw a small circle around the dot.
Say - "Everything in the circle is what I know and everything outside the circle is what I don't know."
Now draw a larger circle around the other.
Say - "Everything inside this circle is what I know and everything outside the circle is what I don't know."
Continue this until the circle gets larger and larger.
It seems to me that the more you know, the more you don't know!

love you
rs