Dear ____

The things I find myself writing these days are often short and while they mean something to me I often have the feeling that my perspective has become so personal that if I shared them they would either make no sense or seem to be superficial to others unless I explained the content with a lengthy preface and explication.

The other morning I was on the front porch thinking about the fleeting mortality of human existence, ours and the lives of our ancestors, and the coming to and going through and passing from this life we all share. Later I wrote something which conveyed the essence of that moment to me. I’d like to share it with you, because I think you will understand it.

There’s A Reason For Everything

On the porch with coffee this morning I wonder if there is a reason for anything until we give it one. And so I give a reason to this thought which comes while a chain of geese who winter on the valley floor here fly between me and the morning mountain skyline to the southwest, and the edge of morning flares along the eastern ridge.

And as quickly as it appeared, the thought is gone.

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Dear Bob,

“There’s A Reason For Everything” has the quality of a koan, or one of those moebius strips – the rational brain can only follow it so far, and then something happens… we come so close to the edge of functionality of the subject/object duality that it starts to wobble and break up, like all those phenomena that are imagined to happen as you approach the speed of light, at the wobbly edge of what the brain will do…

It’s making me think of a line from Rilke which I have seen quoted but never been able to find in any of the poems of his I read, along the lines of ‘We are bees to the Unseen’…

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Dear _____

It is a koan. I especially like your use of the word “wobble,” it’s just a perfect word to describe the back and forth oscillation we humans experience across the line of demarcation between being and seeing, of beholding versus perceiving – of being engaged on the one side with the simple facts of our holistic divine existence and then wobbling across the line toward the pole of reason, mind, words, personality, and actions. We wobble between that immutable essence which we behold in its timeless unity and wholeness and the place where our individual perceptions apprehend it and translate it locally in our own experience.

The Rilke quote is this one:

 “…we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. … It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”

This is that place where the divine and existential unite. Rilke’s remark resonates particularly well with me in its embrasure of living a full, passionate life and his recognition of the spiritual honey gathered from a full-on, sometimes wild engagement there.

Rutger Hauer’s “Tears in Rain,” the final soliloquy of the warrior cyborg in the movie Blade Runner, is considered one of the best death soliloquies in the history of film. I think it is one of the best affirmations of the passionate life as well.

Yes, ultimately the piece as a koan is meant to conduct the beholder from the place where we wildly collect the honey of our particular lives to the moment when “something happens” and we are aware of the “great golden hive of the invisible” made visible in the mountains and the geese and sky and edge of morning and end of night.

It’s that transcendental edge, the place where we are, in your words, at the wobbly edge of what brain will do, where suddenly the local mind disappears in the presence of the great mind. We are as ancient as the mountains; the very molecules which constitute us are simultaneously flying in the geese; the photons in our very atoms are dancing in the corona of light on the mountain ridge at the edge of morning, at the end of night. And when we die – as the soliloquy says – “all those… moments… will be lost in time, like tears… in… rain.” And they will be found there, too.

It is the place Wallace Steven’s poem “Sunday Morning” arrives at in its end: