Rayton Puzzles

Besides ants, summer always reminds me of raytons. For the uninitiated, a 'rayton' is the name given to those wonderful rays of sunlight that streak out of the clouds at dusk. Since Mothers are the font of all knowledge, such as "if you don't stop pouting, your face will freeze like that" and other equally stunning assessments of the consequences of human behavior, when asked by my son what those streaks in the sky were called, I just said the first thing that popped into my head-- raytons. If you come up with something better, let me know.

Humans have a great hunger to name and explain. I'm not sure all of it can be written off to mothering. Life is full of remarkable events and wondering over our relationship to them is the powerful force that produced art and religion. I've often felt that life for each of us was an enormous puzzle and as we live each day, wondering or questioning, or enjoying what comes to us, we are finding pieces to our own. And since I can't resist carrying that metaphor a bit further, as I grow older I can see how we often pick up a piece that doesn't really go in our puzzle and spend much time and effort trying to make it do so.

Wondering about raytons and ant trails and fluttering moths is the part of being human that moves us out of instinctual living. Our ability to be inquisitive is more than curiosity. It carries the potential for reflection and discernment which provide an opportunity for us to see and even interpret, the larger picture being created by the smaller events of everyday life. Science can explain the causal principals but it cannot explain the symbolic. When we love hummingbirds and begin to notice one always seems to appear in some form when we are going through a difficult time or we step outside and gaze at the dazzle of evening raytons and feel a deep sense of belonging, then we have left the realm of factual knowing and crossed the threshold into the world of the soul. Here we find a different kind of knowing. Here we know things not because we can explain them, but because they are recognized by our deep self. This is the land of intuition and inspiration and hunches. This is the place where trust originates that supports faith and love. This is where it does not matter if what we experience or believe makes any sense to anyone else. It isn't meant for them, it's meant for us. The intimacy we create with ourselves in these moments is the richness part of being human. We are interpreting our world in terms that mean something to us and by doing so, we place ourselves as an essential participant within it. That's when a piece of our puzzle fits.

So after I told my son he was seeing raytons, he turned to me in astonishment and said, "You mean God has a raygun?"

How surely gravity's law,

strong as an ocean current,

takes hold of even the smallest thing

and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing---

each stone, blossom, child---

is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,

push out beyond what we each belong to

for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered

to earth's intelligence

we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves

in knots of our own making

and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again

to learn from the things,

because they are in God's heart;

they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:

to fall,

patiently to trust our heaviness.

Even a bird has to do that

before he can fly.

Wenn etwas mir vom Fenster fallt -Rilke