Sometimes (particularly in a holiday season!) lists of things to think about and do can consume us. This poem by Denise Levertov reminds us of an essential truth that, when we remember it, isn't just one more thing to add to the list, but is a way of seeing what is around us in a different way—much like turning the knob on a set of binoculars so that our view changes from a fuzzy mess to a clear picture of what we couldn't distinguish before. It isn't as if the turn of the knob produces the thing being seen; it was always there. We just needed some help in recognizing it for what it always was and is.
Primary Wonder
by Denise Levertov
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.©Denise Levertov, in Sands of the Well (New Directions Books, 1998).
I have a friend who drives with his wife just about every evening to a particular spot to watch the sun set. It is a ritual of gratitude and remembrance, attention and discipline that they practice not just when it's been a particularly good or particularly bad day, but every day regardless of the events it has held.
Today, and each day, there is mystery all around us—mysteries of birth, mysteries of death, mysteries of friendship and love, mysteries of individual snowflakes and fingerprints, mysteries of another day past and another day beginning. Sometimes, if we pause and make ourselves be still long enough to look and listen to something other than the "clamoring courtiers" vying for our attention in the "antechambers" of our attention, we can see the mystery that is present in everything around us. As a friend of mind (who was legally blind) often said, the key to perspective is to "focus."
That is what practices like driving every evening to watch the sun set are for. They make a hollowed-out space in our time so that we can give attention to something besides the "problems" and "solutions" that wait in a snaking line for their turn at the front of our mind's attention.
A day's "diversions" are myriad, and often speak very loudly into our ears. In fact, they don't seem like diversions; they seem like essentials, as do all problems that wake us up in the middle of the night. Because of this, habits of mental sabbath are good practices to have. But sometimes, it is the moments that are just plain given to us out of the blue that embody the mystery most fully, when that quiet mystery becomes present to us in spite of ourselves and what effort we have or haven't made to encounter it and we suddenly grasp that we aren't the ones who keep this amazing universe running. There is a God in charge of that.
Sometimes the mystery elbows into our consciousness through a pool of light made by a full moon in a dark room. Sometimes it appears within an apology we had given up on hearing. Sometimes it comes from laughing so hard at a shared joke that we find ourselves in tears.
I've encountered it sitting in an apartment lobby, waiting for people to arrive so that I could let them in to a gathering. During the mundane task of waiting, it fell on me—the mystery that my life "happened" to coincide with their lives, that our lives should intersect, that I had the privilege of calling them friends. It was a way of seeing that was steeped in mystery and gratitude and it permanently changed my way of seeing the people I share my life with.
When this happens, when we find ourselves gobsmacked by the wonder of what we have been given in this life, and are able to see the people and things themselves rather than just the worry or concern we surround them with, the most essential thing we can do is to revel in them and say thank you, as Levertov does in this poem. There is a God who initiates and sustains "cosmos, joy, memory, everything" and sometimes even drops a gift of awareness of these realities right where we can see it. That quiet mystery just comes.
I include the poem a second time below and invite you to read it again—as a prayer of confession, gratitude, and adoration to the Lord, the Creator, the Hallowed One and as an entrance into the mystery the poet eloquently points us toward.
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.
Reflection Questions: What mystery do you see right now, in your specific life and in the wider world around you? Do you see God's sustaining power today? What amazes you?
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Louise
