My first memory of what the first of our UU Sources calls “transcending mystery and wonder” is an experience I had when I was quite little, maybe five or six years old. Every summer, my family and I sailed the coast of Maine in our wooden sailboat. Our boat had a nice fat bowsprit (the mast-like thing that sticks out in front of the bow). My two sisters and I thought it was just made for riding on like a horse and we did—as much as our parents would let us.

That day, the surface of the water was very smooth and clear, but there were big, rolling waves—my Dad called them swells—made by a storm way out at sea somewhere. We sat astride the bowsprit, hanging out in front of the bow of the boat, as it glided up one side of a smooth, clear, green hill of water, over the top and whooshed down the other side, over and over again. It felt as if I was flying or riding a sea serpent. It felt as if I were part of the boat and the boat were part of the water and everything was part of everything. It was as if I—the me I thought I was, did not exist anymore, except as part of the boat and the green-blue waves, and the whole universe.

Then I noticed an amazing thing. I looked at the shadow of my own head in the water and I saw that I had a halo! All around my shadow, there was a ring of golden wavy light. I thought to myself, “That’s why I feel so magical. I am magical! I have a halo!” I looked at my sister’s shadows and did not see any halos. I was the only one with a halo! As you can imagine, I thought I was pretty special.

Of course, my halo was simply an effect of the sun behind me. A total solar eclipse of the head. So it turns out I was wrong when I thought I was the only one with a halo. It must have seemed to my sisters that each of them was the only one with a halo. But, in fact, each of us was part of the mystery, part of the wonder.

I was raised Unitarian Universalist in the 1960s. I did not learn to pray, or really to think or talk about God at all. In Sunday school I enjoyed the lessons about other people’s gods, and they may have had something to do with my becoming an   archaeologist, but church was not where I connected with the mystery. For me, that happened in nature. Sailing, on long hikes, keeping a nature journal with my Dad, free-range exploring and playing outside—these were the times I felt most myself and most connected to life.

By high school I had stopped attending church—in buildings. For many years, nature was my only church, and I found great solace there. But often life seemed overwhelming. I felt and saw the brokenness of the world very deeply, but felt paralyzed. I was lucky to find a similarly disillusioned husband, who also enjoyed being outdoors a lot. We put off having children for a long time, feeling that they would cramp our canoeing and bike-riding style, but it also seemed like madness to bring more children into such a messed up world. Thankfully, we eventually came to our senses and had two wonderful daughters.

The births of both our daughters were profoundly moving experiences. Suddenly there was a new person who had not been there moments before. Exactly where did she come from? On one level I knew only too well—on another, it was a mystery. I will never forget their soulful eyes regarding us moments after their births. Steve and I coined a phrase for those newborn eyes: we call them whale eyes. They seemed to peer out from the depths, from another realm or dimension. And perhaps they did. Perhaps part of them was still wherever it was they came from, that place I had somehow forgotten and longed to remember.

Having my daughters, watching them grow and witnessing their unjaded  delight in life helped me begin to do just that—to remember. I still felt worn down and sad for them growing up in a relentlessly materialistic world. But they reminded me of something. Exactly what, I could not say, but I could half feel it, around the next corner, just outside my peripheral vision…a dream? a memory? Like a lost paradise…

But of course having children was not always about close encounters with Mystery. We were working parents raising two small kids while attempting to renovate an old neglected house with very few skills or resources. Our long hikes, bike rides, and canoe trips were no more. Meanwhile the world situation appeared to be only worsening with each passing day. This was the time of the first Gulf War, 9/11, the war in Iraq, an Inconvenient Truth—and I found myself in a kind of numb, helpless despair.

Thankfully, once again help was beamed in from the Mystery. This time it came in the form of Sophie, my dog and guardian angel. I had been working at home as a freelance graphic designer for several years, but I had never allowed myself to do anything but work when the kids were off at school. Suddenly a midday walk in the woods was mandated and Sophie was punctilious and insistent with her reminders.

Together we began to explore the uncharted woods and marshes behind our new home. Walks with my silent spirit guide dog became the center of my spiritual life. And winter, a time when I usual became even more depressed, was the best. That was when we would go on snowshoes deep into the frozen marshes, into a strange, stark landscape much like a desert, that was inaccessible at any other time of year. Walking, contemplating and photographing the same few square miles of creation, season in and season out, was a truly healing spiritual practice. Gradually I became more connected to the reality that underlies and imbues everything, but that was so hard to remember when I was up to my eyeballs in housework, deadlines, and children’s homework.

Around the same time, I started attending a Unitarian Universalist church again. I found it comforting and familiar and like home, but at first I didn’t find there what I found in the woods. One day our then-minister, Kitsy Winthrop, offered a sermon based on the book Epiphanies, by Ann Jauregui, a practicing therapist with a PhD. As I read it I felt a sudden shock of recognition. The stories in the book seemed hauntingly familiar—stories of people’s nearly forgotten childhood experiences of a transcendent joy and
an abiding sense of connection to—something. Something huge. It was through reading the book that I
retrieved the lost memory of the bowsprit ride.

Ann Jauregui says in her book:

Shyly, we venture out with our songs and stories into a world still in the thrall of a reluctant science. Yet even now, science is encountering astonishing non sequiturs of its own, surprises that beg us to reinstate all of our stories and include them in our explorations. Above all, these are sacred tales, profoundly healing as they remind us of—and restore us to—our innate all-right-ness.

Sometimes it felt as if I had to dig pretty deep into Unitarian Universalism to find what resonated for me. I did a lot of that digging in small covenant and adult religious education groups at Fellowship. But I was still thirsty for more. And then there was that part of the first source about how wonder and mystery is “affirmed in all cultures.” So I started studying at ChIME, the Chaplaincy Institute of Maine. ChIME is an interfaith wisdom school and is not affiliated with any one denomination. There I learned to become more comfortable with words and practices that would seem quite out of place in a UU service. Words like mystical, which I now use to describe some of my experiences. I could even imagine calling myself a mystic!

I learned that there are mystical traditions in every religion, and that the language used to describe the experiences is amazingly similar across traditions. “The mystery and wonder affirmed by all cultures.” The most important thing I have learned is that I cannot understand everything with  intellect. My rational mind can talk me out of believing in my own direct experiences of ultimate reality, but it can’t experience it. That happens with some other part of me. This revelation, this conversion, is ongoing. I don’t know where it will lead me, but it appears to be picking up speed.

The last section of that first Source says that the direct experience of the wonder and mystery “moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.” The more I pay attention to life and the miracle it truly is, the more I understand that paradise was not in fact lost—just forgotten. It is not around the next corner, but all around us, all the time, right here, right now. Not just in mystical peak experiences, and not just in nature. Not just in a newborn’s eyes, but in everyone’s eyes, could we but see it. Letting this understanding sink deep into my soul is not only my best defense against despair and the resulting paralysis, it is also the only way I can find my true self and my best part to play in life. As I come to feel deeply that I am connected to something bigger than myself, and something essentially good—no, miraculous—I find I might just be able to aid and abet that something, work with it instead of against it. Like catching a wave just right. And that’s when I remember that feeling of riding up one rolling green hill of water and down the other side, just in time to catch the next one, my halo shining around me as I go.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110030742/https://www.questformeaning.org/podcasts/19_08/01.mp3