Mystery

We are surrounded by mystery. Consider for a moment, everything you know. Colors which wear the labels cerulean and crimson. How a snake, hissing and rattling, will rear back before it strikes. How addition is like a line and multiplication is a square. The meal you ate this morning, perhaps eggs turned over slowly to preserve the yolk served beside wheat toast, the smell of which filled your nostrils in the toasting. Think about the color of sheets and how they feel cool when you slide between them at night. When turned this way, like a jewel in the sun, it seems we know so much, rainbow after rainbow causing us to gape with awareness. In that dazzle of colors and snakes, mathematics and eggs, we can forget that this is not all their is.

Now, consider the things we don't know. It is so hard to hold these ideas. They are coiling shadows in the dark created by questions in an empty room. The dark wraps around the things, what ever they are, tucked between the cushions of the couch. It consumes most of history, all those morsels which fall to the floor in undocumented places and times. Everything ahead of now is wrapped in this onyx cloth and as we die the lights of yesterday wink out. When you begin to contemplate all it is you don't know, it is like staring into the space between the stars and measuring how deep it is, how unfathomably deep.

Between this light and shadow hangs a veil, the shimmering curtain of exploration and learning. It is beautiful.

I stand looking at it's translucent structure holding the things I know of my great grandfather, his name and his place of death. I know what has been said about him, but these things swim from the side of the known trailing into the dark. I tug at them with the research I can do. I try to find out if he was a good man, who died trying to take care of his family, or if he was one who abandoned his family, leaving his children and wife struggling. I push back the veil, when I see his face push out of the dark, I reveal new facts, but not what I am looking for. I am enticed by the mystery and frustrated with the way it resists me.

When I started this lunch exercise, I wanted you to see the beauty of the mystery, the fun of pushing back the veil, and even just working to push back the veil. I wanted you to want to investigate those things you don't know, intentionally. I hoped you would appreciate all the things you can learn, all the ways you can grow. I don't think I got there. The seed of the idea, which started in the light has eluded my grasp and slipped back into the darkness and out of sight.