Every day things happen in the world that can’t be explained by any law of things we know.  Every day they’re mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten.  The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight.                       While Otherness watches us from the shadows.

–Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet. Translated by Richard Zenith

I/We are doing it every moment of our lives—Living with Mystery. Every day, every night, taking notice only when that unpredictable mask slips suddenly out of alignment. Oops!  The smokescreen dissolves, and am I walking down the street naked?  Exposed to the Otherness that Pessoa evokes, anything can happen.  Who/whatever sits before the Typewriter at the End of the Universe (see previous post) decides to hit the margin release key in the middle of our story and we’re suddenly on uncharted ground.

Why is this such a scary, even taboo, experience when the veil of Mystery drops and we’re bared to the Unknown?  Y?  O wayward vowel sound…  Aye, why?  The secret chords of our alphabet challenge us to listen with a “third” ear.  Listening through the trumpet of a mystic Moonflower, we may catch the emotional harmonies of our language.  Syllables of sound and synergy reverberate with unexpected frequencies, a long-forgotten poetry. And yet it lives and breathes, right at the tip of our tongue.

Will you linger with me here, and reflect on that inner, lunar resonance?  This is a choice point.  We can carry on reacting to the Unexplained with fear or we, some of us, can carve a bold new footing and gain a deeper grasp of things.

Like this:   When I see my otherwise self-possessed cat take fright and flee into a hidden corner only she can reach, my body instantly registers that freak-out instinct. Flash! Run!  My nervous system flares, a pocket-sized lightning bolt to the gut.  What is that?!  But what if I choose to stand still and look/listen again?  What if I opt instead for composed cat curiosity?  The Gibbous moon phase calls to us at these times with her enigmatic shift of perspective. Her hump-backed allure, like the Pied Piper’s flute, summons us into the quiet mystery and alchemy of Attention.  Wait, look again!  Closely.  And more closely, still.

Many thousands of years ago, the ancestors who helped channel our anxious energies into monumental, wondrous projects (…Stonehenge, Göbekli Tepe, Easter Island moai,  Pyramids of Egypt & Meso-America, Nazca lines and mega-mound creations worldwide, etc) oh, they were brilliant psychological engineers re: the human fear factor.  They gave us, as a collective (whether they meant to or not) something extraordinarily powerful to partake of.  Creatively diverted our craving for easy answers.  Encouraged our devotion to the Mystery with generations of discernment and mindfulness.  Subterranean tunnels, Soaring arches, Cosmic alignments, Sacred geometry…  That inexplicable, epic architecture still stops us in our tracks and steals our breath with the same awe that built it.

But what, here and now in our fast-paced, carefully controlled digital world, can lift us from our lonely, persistent, and instinctive dread of the ineffable?

Certainly there’s plenty of distraction to go around.  A bit of sublimation, some sleight of hand re-direction, a surfeit of glib online guidance…  But once again, wait!  Maybe all we need to help turn our troubled internal tide is simple, everyday human thoughtfulness.  A moment’s consideration, deliberate attention, may liberate hearts and minds.  We’ve had some worthy teachers through time—like our more-than-human ancestors who volunteered for domestication.  Cats, for their fierce intensity and wise instincts.  Dogs, for their pack efficiency and devotion.  Horses, for their sensitive emotional intelligence.  Cattle & elephants, for their useful willingness.  And of course our brilliant Plant medicine teachers who spoke/still speak so clearly to those with the sense to hear.  All our Relations have always been on hand to help us re-focus.

But let’s return now to that deeply disquieting Mystery of life/death/rebirth.  Yes, we are engaging it every minute.  Are of it.  Even when we bury our bewilderment beneath the comforting technology of modern life.  We have at our fingertips the miraculous solutions to so many frightening scenarios!  We rely on ready answers like satellite and cellular communication, bionic body parts, social media, pharmaceuticals, plastic packaging… all powered by natural resources.  And yet all we’ve really answered is how to increase corporate profits at the expense of our precarious, living matrix.  So, let’s set aside the “Answers Placebo” and proceed directly to the forgotten Wellspring of human consciousness.  (Note, consciousness.  Not intelligence.)  Where do we source this wise-hearted, everyday human awareness?

My sense: that Wellspring resides in the elusive domain of Questions. Someplace like the mystical Avalon, where a strange boy pulls a King’s Sword from a magicked stone.

Where?  Who?  What?  Why?  These are Primary Questions with daily heft and nightly drift.  Questions that travel ungoverned ground, outside the margins.  Questions from the heart, hands and feet.  Especially from the Feet!  After all, we are the Two-Legged species.  From the get-go, it’s been a question of Balance for us.  Right leg, left leg, keep the middle in the middle, right leg, left leg.  And before you knew it—miracle of miracles, the primal question of balance was resolved.  We became Toddlers: Upright and walking on our own two feet.  After that accomplishment, the sky’s the limit.  Ask away!  As our child selves did, long ago, unabashed.

Once we’ve discovered our gravitational center and learned to navigate the moving earth under our feet, what is it that hangs in the balance for the rest of our lives?  Having conquered our first great Mystery, so simply framed, will we continue to mindfully choose the transcendent one-step-at-a-time trail of Real Questions?  Or will the treadmill of easy answers keep us racing in place?  Aha!  Here we are once again: standing at the long-ago Crossroads of the Alpha and Omega.  And sometimes, Y.

My Prayer:  From one fertile thought, may 1,000 Moonflower Questions bloom in Mystery.

 And Nelson Mandela’s:  May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.