Mystery

South Florida, in places where the winds off the ocean have been strained through the buildings, the air settles thick and hot. The cicada’s buzzy chirps embody the sound of long-summer-day heat while mockingbirds run through their ever-growing repertoire like a descant. Mosquitoes zing past, the pitch rising and falling in Doppler effect.

The sound of privilege whirs in mowers, trimmers, hedgers, and blowers, shaping the verdant tropics to follow the contours of roadways, driveways, and walkways. Yards frame the houses, now concealing, now revealing, these structures erected against the forces which so often rage against southern barrier islands. Life here is ferocious. Growth must be curbed where the air is warm and moist and the sun is generous year-round.

On the greenway which runs the length of the seaside neighborhood stands an old banyan tree. I come here year after year to sit at its feet and dream. Thin roots drip slow from its branches and twist down toward sandy soil. Braided carelessly by the wind, they thicken into inseparable bonds over the years, spreading shade farther and farther. “Walking trees,” as they have been called. The holes in these plaits provide hiding places for fleshy, curly-tailed lizards that rattle dead leaves as they scurry in and out of them.

I see why the banyan tree captured the hearts of our ancestors, who were privileged with other goods, like million-star skies and a sense of smallness. They could so easily store the secrets of folk-wisdom in the tangled roots, to be released into the magic of the imagination in generations that followed. As I sit, I wonder, “As hurricane winds blew, did men millennia ago know their island to be anchored firm by these great guardians, battened to the bedrock beneath the unsteady ocean? Did they tell stories of these living trees pulling sunlight into the heartwood to give birth to a thousand fireflies to flit about like fairies in the night? Did their roots entomb hapless lovers? Or village sluggards? Did its holes provide portals to the past? Or could you peer through the hardened roots to foresee your fate?”

Today, this old banyan stands like a sacred center in my own imagination. From this center, I could spin out a thousand mysterious tales of a force wise and wild that will outlive our human endeavors. Sitting in its shade, I am beckoned to consider a shadowy belief in things beyond my experience.

I could sit and dream for hours, but the heat and the insects chase me to the cool of the green-blue ocean. Snorkel and mask secured, I swim out to float above a foreign land, waiting, searching, for surprise after surprise. I listen to the rhythm of my breathing. The world around me is blue and green and gray, and I watch light form undulating grids over the ocean floor. I swim through a large school of small fish as they twist a circle into a figure eight. My arms and legs feel the scrape of unmoored seaweed rolling in to shore. Tiny jellyfish, shaped like strange four-sided cylinders, harmlessly bounce off my body, their sides shimmering with a pearly iridescence. Fish refract the sunlight in blues, yellows, reds, oranges, pinks, whites, purples.

Closer to shore, I hold my breath so I can hear the tinkle of shells in the surf as I rock in and out with each wave. The sea floor has been rippled into infinite, crooked parallel lines. The sand beneath explodes in some highly choreographed bombardment, rising in plumes and carried by the current, to settle and rise again and again. When I emerge from the water, the sand and sun warm my body, smoothing and darkening my skin.

There’s something enchanting here. Magic, myth, legend come alive to me, rooted in something deep and imperceptible, unless I trust the tales enough to give myself over to them a little, to be rocked in them like waves or tangled in them like roots. Myth can serve simply as a metaphor for what is deeply true. The truth is that the world centers around things greater than me, things that move slow and long, as benevolent in power as mysterious in manner.

When I see the world through the lens of mystery, I am always delightfully surprised. Ancient things, large trees and vast seas, speak of what was before me and what will be long after I am gone. Here in tropical glory, visions of Eden rise in me from the deeps of an underlying longing I cannot shake. These longings, if I let them, point to a Good Will that holds not just the islands, but the seas themselves in place.

I remember in these moments, even with the noise of mowers and motors, that there are still a million stars out there, and that I am still small. Even so, I am still anchored in the universe by a Will who is good beyond my imagination, who joyfully dispenses grace like a thousand fireflies flitting about in the dark to light the way while I sojourn on this earth.