Trudy and I recently returned from a rather harrowing teaching adventure in Costa Rica. It feels good to be back home in our own place, in our own bed. It’s mysterious getting on an airplane, these metal tubes with thin aluminum walls soaring at 38,000 ft, and all of a sudden you’re on a different continent, in a different culture. It’s extraordinary and mysterious. But there’s an even bigger mystery beside airplanes and cultures. It’s the great spiritual question— Who are we? We get lost in our phones, in our to-do lists. But what if you look up at the night sky? What if you look at the mystery of a single tree or flower? The mystery is amazing because we are amazing. We are beings of spirit, we are beings of consciousness. Spirit came into your body to be born into this incarnation and it will leave it when you die.

“The spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes, shoulders and all the rest. It could float, of course, but would rather plumb rough matter. Airy and shapeless thing, it needs the metaphor of the body.” – Mary Oliver

So consciousness comes into this body to experience human life. Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us, “This body is not me. I am life without boundaries. I’ve never been born and I’ve never died. Since before death and before time, I’ve been free. Birth and death are only doors through which we pass, sacred thresholds. Birth and death are a game of hide and seek.” We get lost and pretend we are separate, that we’re not connected, that we’re not the field of life expressing itself in some new unique way through our incarnation.

All the while, we are mysteriously unfolded by life. I love this extraordinary poem by Pablo Neruda, one of the greatest poets of the last century, who writes about his awakening to poetry—

And it was at that age… Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating planations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky.

I share poetry when speaking about mystery, because as another great poet said, “You can’t get the news from poetry, but men and women die every day from lack of what is found there.”

Poetry connects us to the mystery. This is the same spirit as Buddhist texts that begin with the words, ‘O Nobly Born, remember who you really are, you are the sons and daughters of the awakened ones.’ You are in the lineage of those who have awakened before you. Look directly at the mystery of love and existence. It is your birthright to remember freedom and awakening.

“If I had influence with the good fairy who’s supposed to preside over the birth of all children, I should ask her gift to each child in the world a sense of wonder so indestructible it would last throughout their life.” – Rachel Carson

This is one of the gifts of poetry. We can meditate to quiet the mind, we can calm ourselves, we can de-stress, and we can see in new ways. And with this mindful presence, poetry invites a sense of wonder and mystery, and with that, an opening to love.

With metta,
Jack

This article is an excerpt from my new Dharma Talk and Heart Wisdom Podcast – Ep. 233: Wisdom is Playful. Watch/Listen here.