A Walk

In his poem, The Blessing, poet James Wright wrote, “Suddenly I realize/ That if I stepped out of my body I would break/ Into blossom.” Has life ever seized you in that way? Have you ever had an experience that filled you to overflowing? A good friend of mine tells of driving to Banff, a town near Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies. What she saw so overwhelmed her that she parked on the side of the road and wept for the beauty of it. I suspect that if she had stepped out of her body in that moment she would have broken into blossom.

Unfortunately as the world loses its enchantment, we lose our capacity to experience the mysterious. This is the point of Rainer Maria Rilke's poem entitled, A Walk. He writes, “My eyes already touch the sunny hill,/ going far ahead of the road I have begun./ So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;/ it has its inner light, even from a distance—/and changes us, even if we do not reach it,/ into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;/ a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave.../but what we feel is the wind in our faces.”

It is a very simple poem. It's just about a walk up a hill in sunlight. Except, he says, we are grasped by what we cannot grasp. Something grasps us that has an inner light, a reality that is elusive but commanding. Something grasps us and we stop by the side of the road to weep at the breathtaking beauty of the Canadian Rockies. Something grasps us and we know if we step out of our selves, if we move just beyond the boundary of the body, we will break into blossom. I have in mind breaking into a common dandelion, now bright and yellow, now snowy white, a bouquet of seeds about to be dispersed by the wind. These epiphanies, these peak experiences, these moments of grace, change us, Rilke says, into something we already are. Isn't all life change in which each change brings us closer to our true nature? Yet most of the time we miss what is happening. Life or God, you choose the name to call what is most precious and most profound, waves to us, beckoning, but what we feel is the wind on our faces.

We are grasped by what we cannot grasp: by mystery, by love, by the spirit of life itself. Such is the nature of spirituality, but what we feel is the wind in our faces. The Hebrew word for spirit was wind or breath. We can explain the wind, measure its direction and velocity, and relate its intensity to changing weather systems and various atmospheric conditions. We can experience the wind, but we can't control it. We can feel the wind in our faces, but it is much harder for many of us to embrace with our arms or our minds the wonder and mystery of life.

The capacity to value mystery is enhanced by awareness; by a sense of awe, wonder, and gratitude at the reality of being alive and being a witness to existence; by an appreciation of the mystery that extends beyond the boundary of human knowledge (a boundary that is always changing as human knowledge evolves); and by the meaning and purpose that we create or discover, including the way we live in response to that meaning and purpose.

Our lives are not merely a series of questions to be answered or problems to be solved, but a mystery to be lived. The question, then, is “What puts us in contact with mystery?” The answer is Life. Eduardo Galeano writes about a gift given to a child by his parents when he was born: “they gave him a little bottle sealed up tight [and said]: ‘Don’t ever, ever open it. So you’ll learn to love mystery.’”

We can, and often do, take this mystery for granted. Nevertheless, at times something breaks through and we are, for a moment, transfixed, if not transformed. James Hillman reminds us that, “Moments come when we feel outside time, seized by a longing, moved by an image, in touch with invisible voices.” “We realize,” he continues, “that we do not live in one world only.” Or perhaps we realize what it really means to live in this world, to make contact with the mystery of existence, the mystery of being. It may happen when all we intended to do was go for a walk.