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 them. 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. It was like sparks of light falling behind my eyes. When we were done, I was asked to read something aloud. My voice had dropped at least half an octave, down into a deeper, fuller sound.
Or there’s how our bodies remember. How years can pass, but somehow our bodies know, even if our conscious minds forget: this was the day someone died or that was the month 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 can’t stop my brain from tearing apart these kinds of experiences, in a search for the rational explanation.
It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Science is good, and so is wonder. We can 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? We can examine the moments we feel small, or the ones where we feel so walloping big, no container in the world can hold us; we can return to the known places for comfort and ease, and also seek out the thin places, where we meet the raw, the hard, the beautiful, that which cannot be named, only known, and even then, only partly. By greeting the world with kindness, curiosity, and intelligence, we can illuminate the real and behold the wondrous, and we can always, always stand agape and agog whenever we are lucky enough to happen upon the weird of the world.
Live light, y’all.