Walking with Words
Today's word: mystery
Hey 👋: it’s spring. There’s movement all around and inside of me. I’m offering something different today, inspired by Katherine May (obviously) who started each podcast with a bit of her thoughts while she was often out and about outside. It landed well with me because I’ve found pulled to record things lately than to stop moving and sit and write, so I thought I’d give this a whirl.
Below you can find a cleaned up transcript, or you can listen to my raw rambles by hitting play.
Happy Friday.
I’m out for a walk this morning. It’s nice. The weather finally feels like it’s changing.
Today, I’m walking with the word mystery…the concept of mystery.
It’s been a hard week where I’ve caught myself really trying to dig to the bottom of things for understanding, then beating myself up for the digging and relentlessly oscillating between them both.
Then as I was getting in the shower and anticipating coming out for my walk, I started thinking about this season and all of the things that are appearing around me:
How the Orioles are back…
How weeds are popping up all over my yard and the grass is starting to look a little bit greener….which led me to science and mystery.
With the changing seasons and all these things appearing, I started thinking about how sometimes we try to use science to understand the phenomenology behind it all.
And while I find that interesting, but the thing that I actually enjoy the most about nature is the mystery.
I don’t really want all of the answers.
I like being with it as it unfurl, being fascinated by it and not quite understanding how or why.
Because often when I do get the “how” or “why” it actually doesn’t give me more appreciation for the thing I’ve been examining.
It just sort of lands with an “Oh”.
I get the most enjoyment being present with the mystery AND that’s actually really hard for me.
Especially when it’s something that I care about, the stakes feel really high, or it’s somebody I really care about.
I know that my actions have an impact on them.
I also know that I can drive myself crazy trying to understand how and why I did what I did, but often the thing is just the thing, and the mystery was how it was going to unfurl.
It’s also hard as someone who does have relentless curiosity inside to use that curiosity to expand the mystery in my life.
To follow the threads in order to find more mystery, not to drill down to the bottom of each one.
I think this ties into my spiritual side too.
There’s a lot of mystery in spirituality.
I believe very strongly in energy.
We have a lot of science around energy. Do we understand how all of it works? No.
Is there any test that somebody can run to tell me whether or not something was divinely or energetically guided or if it was just my crazy ass mind?
No.
So, the only thing I have is my experience of making contact with that moment was like.
Allowing what was true for me to be true.
Allowing myself to sit with that mystery.
It’s a really a hard tension for me these days.
So today, I’m going to listen to some birds, look at some trees, find some moss to poke and try to sit with some mystery.
