Mountain Musings

When I was a little girl, in second grade, I once had to bring my big brother his lunch. As I wandered down the other hallway of our school, the hall where the big kids spent their days, I was in awe. "This," I thought. "This is where I will be in just a few long years, and when I am here, I will be big, and I will learn all the important things I need to know to be a good person."

I wasn't all wrong. I never did get to the end rooms of that particular hallway because we switched schools, but I did manage to grow and learn all the things a sixth grader needs to know in this world. But it turns out there's a lot of life beyond sixth grade, and mumblety years later, I'm still working on learning all the important things I need to know to be a good person.

I spent last week in the beauty of the mountains of Colorado, adding a few more items to my life-skills toolbox. I was on a women's retreat called the Web of Wisdom, learning more about the teachings of Virginia Satir, learning to lay the textbook guidelines over the shape my life holds today, and applying them to MY "stuff".

My years are no longer long ones. Time has worked its trick, and where once months stretched on for eons, they're now present-then-past before I've quite grasped they were here. I now know I will never learn all the important things; too many of them are still unknowable. I have a hard time even forming the questions; I know the answers are beyond me.

The concept of Death, and the idea the Universe will end in far-flung dark fragments, these make intuitive sense to me. But life. How can life, so incredibly fragile, spring from chaos to exist?

I look out into the universe after dark, at the complexity of the night sky, and marvel because, were I able to look inward, I would see that same macro complexity on a micro scale. How can this be?

The small spring flower I saw on my walk. Somehow, despite the fact it has no "brain", it knew the time was right to pop its head above the dirt to greet the spring. How do it know what it do and when to do it?

I can't picture the shape a life could possibly take once a physical body dies, but I stop a moment and mourn when I come across a dead bird in the grass. Where did that graceful energy go? I only know it has gone to where I can no longer sense it.

I am closer in age to being old than I am to being young. I know my time to die will quickly be on the horizon, and I am curious. Will I get to find out for myself where the energy, where the self, goes when that happens? Or does the screen just go black? I can't believe my "self" will get to go on, but I also can't believe my energy will just, *poof*, disappear. (Turns out I am rather attached to the notion of my energy-self existing in some form or another. I don't WANT to not be...)

Knowing I will never know the answers both frustrates me - because I want to KNOW, please and thank you! - and delights me - because there is beauty in the mystery.

Beauty Is.