One Mysterious Mind

Whatever you can say about anything, the opposite is also true. We don’t just inhale we also exhale—both parts of breathing constitute the whole.

My sister shows me her Israeli Identity papers. She points to her name in Hebrew letters that fill in the form; then to our parents’ names, then her children’s names. She smiles, her heart swells to be living in a country where the state recognizes her identity as blood lineage. I say, “It gives me the creeps.” We are two of a kind from opposite sides of the whole.

I sit in silence each morning noticing my breath, noticing my thoughts. I experience this life as a mystery that cannot be defined or limited by identity. Whatever you can say about me, whatever I can think about me is only an incomplete restricted frame, a partial construct.  True science is the art of looking and our science has seen, through honest looking, into the mystery that in reality there is no there there. I’ve seen there is also no me here.

In the language of mathematics there are both integral and differential equations. The first breathes in, the second breathes out. The entire cosmos both integrates and differentiates. A star bursts into being radiating outward bright with elemental fire and eventually fades dull into black, sucking in everything around it.

One day I feel a void so empty I can see no reason for being. The next day the scent of pine, the smile of a baby swells my heart to golden light full of meaning.

One administration comes in with a confident stride of hope and a can-do enthusiasm that ignites the feeling of connection to all life. Then comes the attitude of building walls, fear of otherness, turning the equation from expansion to contraction.

I feel the entire cosmos expanding and contracting with the life force that animates this body, this life, and all being. I am that, beyond tribal identities or personal delineations.

The grandpa outside playing with his 18-month-old grandson teaches him, “up and down, up and down”

I glance at a printed article on my table entitled, “Beware of False Dichotomies.” I haven’t read it yet; don’t know what it concludes; have no argument with it. I live in a world in which false and true are but two angles of vision divided by one mysterious mind.