Who Done It?

Most mornings here on the water, there is usually some small mystery to be pondered, some evidence of surreptitious activity from the night before. Most of what I discover is in the leftover stage of having been eaten. That means it is in one of three remaining forms: leftover, spit up or shall we say, 'digestively processed'.

Exactly who the perpetuators of any of the previous mentioned actions are, I sometimes can figure out. I've gotten to know a good many of my night stalkers over the last three years and on occasion have even seen them--usually because of a turf war of some sort. Raccoons are most often involved in that. They are not the sharing type. The rest is based on conjecture. Like these mushrooms. The warm summer rains have been followed several times by cool evenings and that has created a flush of mushrooms in all sorts of colors and type on the forest floor and up into the beds around the house. From the looks of this one, it appears that either dinner was interrupted or not enjoyable. Which do you think?

The older I get, the more I appreciate the value of not knowing. Somehow it isn't as scary to admit that life is a mystery and huge portions of it are and will be undecipherable.  It doesn't mean we don't go on living as fully as we can; it means giving up the myth that we can control everything that happens to us. There is a place within all of us that needs mystery, needs to relinquish the frantic scrambling to always have things go the way we think they should. I'm not talking about order and hygiene. I'm talking about attempting to construct our worlds to our own set dimensions, instead of leaving the door at least cracked for what might show up unplanned. I'm thinking that the most beautiful, wondrous parts of our lives are really not understandable and oftentimes they are the stickiest and messiest. They are those places where we experience beauty, love, and truth. They carry within them the power to transform us through and through, over and over and no amount of thinking will ever be able to explain why.


Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever

 in allegiance with gravity

while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds will

never be broken.

How people come, from delight or the

scars of damage,

to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.


Let me keep company always with those who say
"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.


Mary Oliver, Mysteries, Yes