Sometimes it happens. Sometime you are talking an early evening walk on a near-record hot evening on a street in a drought stricken North Carolina town, as I was yesterday. Sometimes you yearn for the afternoon rain showers that were promised but never arrived.

Sometimes, as we did, you turn a corner, lift your eyes from the faded grass and cracked clay soil, and see…..

It didn’t last more than a dozen blinks before beginning to dwindle. Soon there was only a pale hint, a mere thumbprint of color remaining. Then gone.

But I knew I had seen it! And that beauty remained — growing more and more vivid in my heart.

Has that ever happened to you? It may not have been a rainbow but another tiny glimpse or word or musical note of wonder that shifts something inside you, that leaves behind a kind of kiss.

[ …..And how I am smiling now! When I sat down to write this post, it was just another dry afternoon — but, just as I was typing the last sentence, a torrent of rain began and continues. An echo? an answer?]

I have been silent for a long time, overwhelmed by the wanton destruction that we humans are inflicting not only on each other but on all forms of life, by our collective refusal to look beyond the fears that make us us cling so stubbornly to thoughts and actions that have become a form of suicide. I have let myself become frozen, immobilized by despair.

And then … “rainbows” show up. This morning it was a note from WordPress on the monthly “stats” for Sharing Tricksters Hoard, this blog to which I’ve contributed nothing for months. Today I did something different for my usual non-response. I noticed the old posts that had been popular recently. 18 people had read a post entitled “Living Into The Mystery,” written June 17, 2022. I don’t know why but I decided to look at it, to see what I’d said.

I was amazed. My words and especially those of Martin Shaw, whom I’d quoted at great length, were exactly what I needed to hear. It’s as if I’d opened a letter from my previous self that had been addressed to my current self, arriving at just the right moment of emotional and physical stress. Coincidence? Serendipity? Synchronicity? Magic? Mystery?

I have put the link to my post above. In it, I quote extensively from Martin Shaw’s article “Navigating the Mysteries” in Emergence Magazine. I hope you’ll read his full essay.

Here I’ll share some of Shaw’s sentences that delighted me today.

MARTIN SHAW:

“The correct response to uncertainty is mythmaking. It always was. Not punditry, allegory, or mandate, but mythmaking. The creation of stories. We are tuned to do so, right down to our bones. The bewilderment, vivacity, and downright slog of life requires it. And such emerging art forms are not to cure or even resolve uncertainty but to deepen into it. There’s no solving uncertainty. Mythmaking is an imaginative labor not a frantic attempt to shift the mood to steadier ground. There isn’t any.”

“What if we reframed “living with uncertainty” to “navigating mystery”? There’s more energy in that phrase. The hum of imaginative voltage. And is our life not a mystery school, a seat of earthy instruction?”

“But to navigate mystery is not the same thing as living with uncertainty. It doesn’t contain the hallmarks of manic overconfidence or gnawing anxiety. …. There’s no franchise or hashtag attached. Navigating mystery humbles us, reminds us with every step that we don’t know everything, are not, in fact, the masters of all.”

“The old stories say, enough; that one day we have to walk our questions, our yearnings, our longings. We have to set out into those mysteries, even with the uncertainty. Especially with the uncertainty. Make it magnificent. We take the adventure. Not naively but knowing this is what a grown-up does. We embark. Let your children see you do it. Set sail, take the wing, commit to the stomp. Evoke a playful boldness that makes even angels swoon. There’s likely something tremendous waiting.“

"Set sail, 
take wing, 
commit to the stomp.
Evoke a playful boldness 
that makes even angels swoon.
There's likely something tremendous waiting."

Now the rainstorm has moved on.
I can’t see a rainbow, but tiny drops still glisten on some of the leaves.
It is enough.

Could it be that Mystery is a great sea?

Could it be that we are called to step out of our leaking lifeboats,

to dance –with, no doubt, some stumbles– upon the ever shifting waves?