Music heard so deeply that
it is not heard at all,
but you are the music.
…..T.S. Eliot
Mystery is usually associated with the darker side of life, with death or fear of the unknown. In religion and art, mystery is light itself. It’s the lifeblood that pumps through true religious and artistic practice. Mystery is the itch that you can’t scratch, the driving force of spiritual and creative journeys. It sets in motion the basic questions of our existence. It fuels genuine scientific investigation. It invites us to peek around the next corner, into the darkness. Mystery is the seed of discovery. It is very subtle and slippery, impossible to nail down or explain. yet we’re somehow aware of its presence, and it has a real impact on us. In order for us to perceive this subtle quality, three elements must be in place- trust in our spiritual practice, trust in the creative process, and most importantly, trust in ourselves. If any of these are missing, the whole structure collapses, and we retreat into certainty. So we trust, even if we can’t explain or justify why we do what we do….John Daido Loori
there is an innate innocence to mysterious realms…..we deserve to explore and to rest in the daydreams…..where our deepest stories lie right behind the veil…..this sacred process reminds us of our hunger for what sustains us…..the beautiful source of what lies behind fear…..
Last night the moon rose behind four distinct pine-tree tops in the distant woods and the night at ten was so bright that I walked abroad. But the sublime light of night is unsatisfying, provoking; it astonishes but explains not. Its charm floats, dances, disappears, comes and goes, but pales in five minutes after you have left the house. Come out of your warm, angular house, resounding with few voices, into the chill, grand, instantaneous night, with such a Presence as a full moon in the clouds, and you are struck with poetic wonder. In the instant you leave far behind all human relations, wife, mother and child, and live only with the savages- water, air, light, carbon, live, and granite. I become a moist, cold element. ‘Nature grows over me.’ Frogs pipe; waters far off tinkle; dry leaves hiss; grass bends and rustles, and I have died out of the human world and come to feel a strange, cold, aqueous, terraqueous, aerial, ethereal sympathy and existence. I sow the sun and the moon for seeds……Ralph Waldo Emerson
