mysterium

Today’s post is partial, unresolved.

An opening not a concluding.

My grandmother wouldn’t be thrilled. “I don’t like abstract stories,” she once told me. Worse, this isn’t even a story. Just a preoccupation.

To start concretely, I have once again marveled this week at a small wooden bowl my friend Pat made. Some years ago, he and his wife, the lovely Mel, arrived to dinner at mine. The bowl came as a housewarming gift.

I love the bowl – its size, its smoothness, its color. I often wonder at it. How did Pat make the bowl?

I asked him this week and he spoke of woodturning and lathes. I asked how long it took to smooth the wood into form – a few days.

The abstraction that has been on my mind this week is the idea of Life itself, along with craft and creation, as part mastery, part mystery – whether it be a bowl, a poem, or a sourdough bread. Which reminded me of the psychologist, author and wisdom teacher Paul Dunion and his regular mentions of the Mysterium Tremendum. The Great Mystery of Life.

Even if you’re firmly committed to the realm of logic and the scientifically provable, the odds of you being here, reading this, are four trillion to one. There’s no mastery in that. You are a miracle.

I think what this post really wants to be about is the devotion to practicing a discipline – the creative acts mentioned above, or perhaps just regular forest walks, or perhaps a course of study, or perfecting your golf swing or tennis serve or in my case, laying out words onto paper. Whenever I have felt stuck in life, committing to a PROCESS, some sort of discipline has saved me. I believe this is because the exercise sends up smoke signals to call for invisible help.

The decision to pursue a level of mastery opens space for mystery. In his book The Creative Act, Rick Rubin says it like this:

Though artists generally aren’t aware of it, that end work is a by-product of a greater desire. We aren’t creating to produce or sell material products. The act of creation is an attempt to enter a mysterious realm. Art is our portal to the unseen world.

In his new book The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery, Adam Gopnik agrees:

The true mystery of mastery, he speculates, may be found not in a technique that must be learned, but, rather, in the infinitely renewable moment of performance: “We engage in the perpetual play with the invisible Other.”

All week I hoped to remember where it was that I read or listened to someone talking about this awareness of mystery-mastery … and the way the highest realms of mastery lean into the mysterium. Which is what I think about my bowl. I can’t find it – the reference I sought. But I decided to go ahead and mention it anyway.

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Today’s post was penned swiftly, with a sense of guilt about my grandmother. As I mentioned in my last post, I have handed over most of my writing hours to my book and have left only minutes to tend to this blog – which offers the pleasure of finishing work on Something. However incomplete.

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