The Comfort of Mystery

Theme for January: Abundance

Sunday, January 31, 2021

It’s surprising to me that I now often take comfort in the fact that I don’t really know much of anything – that I am a total mystery living in a universe of mysteries. In my earlier years, it was the exact opposite: I always took comfort from knowing. It seemed like the more I knew, the stronger and safer I would be. Back then, life was a puzzle that simply needed to be slowly and carefully learned, figured out, and ‘put together’. Now, however, in my 79th year, I take genuine comfort in the realization that, yes, life is a puzzle, but one that is infinitely vast and multifaceted, and therefore infinitely beyond understanding. When I was younger, it was as if life was an amazing but finite sky that I somehow needed to analyze and understand. Now, in these elder years, life is still that amazing sky, but I now know that this sky called life – or reality -is completely without boundaries. Now, I take pleasure – and comfort – in simply being constantly amazed by that sky, and in realizing that the phenomenon called ‘Hamilton Salsich’ is an essential and everlasting part of that boundless, wondrous, and eternally mysterious sky.     

A GREAT MYSTERY
(Jimmy Lee H., 76, Blessings, CT)
 
One morning, 
he found a great mystery. 
It was made of stillness and sincerity,
and it stood before him 
like an unfolding tree. 
It told him, 
in words that seemed homemade,
that all things were sympathetic to him - 
the air that thronged around him 
wherever he was, 
the endless silence 
that sweetly waited for him 
to notice it, 
and this moment 
that is thoughtfully choosing him, 
like each moment does. 
He stared at the mystery,
and he knew the whole universe 
was sincerely staring back at him 
in amazement,
and wisdom was dancing 
from mystery to mystery,
from stars to planets to stars.