Mystery, and Wonder (restruck)
The World is Full of Mystery, and Wonder
The force that drives the green fuse of a flower,
the force that orders my atoms
in such fashion that I am blessed with consciousness,
the force that turns the ancient cosmic wheels.
Are these forces one, or many?
Walk in late spring along a country path,
enter a meadow strewn with dead leaves.
Dead leaves, in May. Pass through them, and
the leaves rise up in a great cloud, dead brown
surface mutating to sky blue iridescence beneath:
thousands of fluttering butterflies disturbed in their ritual.
Sit crosslegged at a cliffedge in October,
still for many morning minutes, grokking
cloud patterns, feeling the unseasonable sun
warming the rocks. And from the corner of an
eye see movement, a slithering.
Suddenly snakes are everywhere, come forth
from a cliffedge viperpit for a last taste of summer.
Rubber boas, garters, bullsnakes and rattlesnakes,
willing to share the sun's bounty, but timid:
slipping back into cracks at the wave of a hand.
What to make of a week when,
standing under a tree, sitting on a porch,
every look up reveals another fat black body
with scarlet hourglass, another black widow spider
dangling by a thread overhead?
And how did the labourious removal
of iron from an aspen-ringed glade
lead to the spontaneous upburst of
millions of mushrooms?
To ponder is to wonder.
To ponder close, to ponder long
is to grow the wonder.
Mystery, growing greater
with greater knowledge and experience.
RDH
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