Answer #10- Savor the Mystery

“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen

 

 

No one has all the answers. If they do, run away from them. If they have all the answers then they haven't asked all the questions. And what are our lives but giant question marks? Searching for who we really are, searching for what life is about. That's the great adventure. How wonderful and endless is the universe, bigger than we can ever imagine.

And now, each night, I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.
Leroi Jones

 I have no problem living in ambiguity, in puzzles and riddles and mysteries, in the space between waking and sleeping, in the magic hour between day and night. In the unfinished novel, the lost artwork, the destroyed manuscript. In the confusing dream. In the lost and found, the blooming and fading, the beauty and the desolation. In the uncertainty of existence. I have no qualms about letting go of my belief system if another door opens to me. I am enjoying the journey because the destination is still enshrouded in fog. I don't know. I know that I don't know. The honest doubter intrigues me more than the passionate believer. Every day we should wonder if we have stopped growing, if we have become fixed in a time, a set of beliefs, a rigid code. Are we now frozen in amber? Are we unwilling to change? Because the world does not wait with us. It rushes onward and something new always appears to open our eyes a little further.

At the still point of destruction
At the centre of the fury
All the angels, all the devils
All around us can't you see
There is a deeper wave than this
Rising in the land
There is a deeper wave than this
Nothing will withstand.
I say love is the seventh wave
Sting

And we are our own mystery too, to ourselves and to others. There are secrets I will take to my grave. That is my right, to nurture them in the 'pointe vierge', the still point in my heart of hearts. (The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton refers to this 'virgin' point as the center of nothingness where one meets God). You don't have to reveal all, you don't have to spill your uniqueness away to strangers. It's alright to be 'misunderstood', to be an enigma, to be a world unto yourself.

People

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

Nothing in them in not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.

And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.

To each his world is private
and in that world one excellent minute.

And in that world one tragic minute
These are private.

In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight
it goes with him.

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.

Whom we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?

Brother of a brother? Friend of friends?
Lover of lover?

We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.

They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.

And every time again and again
I make my lament against destruction.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko