Agape and Agog

Hey. This week I thought I’d share a piece I wrote five years ago. I’d forgotten all about it, and yet here I am, still running after magic, always ready to stand agape and agog, and proud to count myself among the weird of the world. Enjoy!

I have a complicated relationship with that which cannot be explained.

Take, for instance, what happened to the friend who was digging up some of my many flowers to take home to her garden. I was inside working, and she said that she thought she was going to have to stop, because the plants wouldn’t budge. The flowers resisted with every last root hair.

My friend, who had helped me through an incredibly difficult time, began talking to the wild things. She thanked them for protecting me and my house. She praised them for all they had done and told them their work here was done. That I would be okay. “Suddenly, it was like the plants were leaping out of the ground,” she later told me.

Another inexplicable happened when I was at a yoga teacher training this weekend. When I arrived, I felt ornery and depleted, exhausted by a sharp and fragmented energy. The relentless sun we’d been experiencing lately had burned a hole in me, just like a cigarette on a carpet.

My yoga teacher led us through a grounding series of breathing and postures, and I could tell the exact moment the oppressive emotional storm inside broke. Sparks of light fell behind my eyes like a shower of stars.

When we were done, I was asked to read something aloud. My voice had dropped at least half an octave. It was deep, rich, utterly grounded.

Or there’s how our bodies remember. How years can pass, but somehow our bodies know, even if our conscious minds forget: this was when a beloved one died or the day of the diagnosis.

My complicated relationship with the inexplicable is this: I want magic in the world. In fact, I seek it out, relentlessly.

And I often can’t stop my brain from tearing apart these kinds of experiences, in a search for the rational explanation.

Why do we think it has to be one or the other?

Science is good. So is wonder.

Why not use every single clue available to us to understand this mystery that is life?

The sorrows, the joys, the facts, and the inexplicables—what are they all trying to tell us?

When we feel small, what narrative chains might we need to break?

When we feel so walloping big that no container in the world can hold us, how can we hold all that ache and wildness in our soft and fierce hearts, letting it feed us in the dark and cold days?

How can we brave seeking out the thin places, where we meet the raw, the hard, the breathtaking? Because that is where awe lives.

It’s a new day. How about living our hearts out, open to encountering again and again the wondrous inexplicables.

Then, we can stand, agape and agog, lucky to be amongst the weird of the world.