I thought about this last night during an unexpected visit with Katharine Hepburn being interviewed by Barbara Walters. They dropped by via the VCR out of an old stack of videocassettes I keep for emergency TV.

You see, I used to tape stuff and forget to identify it. Now, years later, it’s a little like having a pantry full of canned goods with the labels gone. Definitely potluck. But I like the mini-thrill of not knowing who’ll show up on my screen, yet sure it’ll be someone worthwhile. Last night’s can of soup served up an ancient 20/20 interview filmed shortly before Hepburn died.

A true eccentric, Kate revealed her distaste for closets, preferring to keep all her clothes visible and laid out on a bed. But the part of the interview that caught my attention came toward the end.

Barbara leaned toward her guest in that let’s-get-intimate way she’s known for and asked, “Are you ever in doubt?”

“Practically always,” Kate said.

“Yet you’re so definite.”

“Yes, I am. You might as well be,” Kate answered with a regal certitude that even the uncontrollable body tremors she inherited from her grandfather couldn’t shake.

“But inside you’re really not sure. It’s just outside?” Barbara asked, doubtfully. Then she leaned back, a startled expression on her face, and said, almost accusingly: “You have influenced my life. I have believed everything you ever said, and now you tell me you’re not really sure, at this late date?”

Like Barbara, I’d like to believe some people are totally clear about what they’re doing. That way, there’d be some hope for a doubtless me in the future.

At the same time, I used to think there was something good, something useful about doubt. I imagined a doubt-free world as chaos, full of people running roughshod over each other with their unalterable convictions. But I’ve changed my mind. Doubt, especially the kind turned inward, destroys.

Anyway, how can anything that feels so awful be healthy? My dictionary says doubt means “to hold questionable, hesitate to believe, to distrust.” But I look to the obsolete definition for the deep truth. Doubt used to mean “to fear or dread.”

Awhile back, another TV interviewer asked Steven Spielberg if, after producing so many successful movies, he ever worried about failing. “Always,” he said. “In fact, every morning when I go to work I doubt that I can pull it off.” I remember Johnny Carson, too, saying he’d never once walked out to do a monologue without stage fright. Just another name for doubt.

Doubt is the fear that we can’t pull it off, that nothing will show up for us, that we’ll fail this time for sure. It plagues me every time I sit down to write.

We learn to doubt ourselves as children through countless little incidents that erode confidence. I remember writing an essay in fifth grade about why I was glad to be an American. Proud that it was selected for submission to a local contest, I brought it home. My father read it aloud, laughing the whole time (maybe at how sure I was of my convictions). It probably was funny, as kid’s stuff often is, but I hadn’t intended it to be. Mortified, I wanted to crawl under the dining table and pull the chairs in after me.

Now I agree with the wise man who told me doubt is a lie. It’s false certainty, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Doubt pretends to question, but it’s already judged you. Coming from a place of fear, doubt stops everything cold, closes down the “third eye” (intuition, guidance, perception), and kills anything new.

“What’s needed,” he said, “is curiosity. If you let doubt signal a need to know what’s true, space opens for an inquiry to find out.”

I liked that, so I began to answer my doubt with “I wonder,” as in “if this isn’t right, I wonder what is?” I discovered that something new, often surprising, always shows up in the presence of wonder. Maybe a fresh direction or a hot idea or a creative solution.

Then I got curious about “wonder” itself, and my dictionary revealed three distinct meanings:

1. To speculate about curiously
2. To be filled with admiration, amazement, awe
3. A miracle

So, to wonder is to question curiously, which opens the way for amazement at finding a miracle.

Beats doubt by a long shot.

“What I want,” she said, as though the words themselves were dangerous, “is to know what I want.”

She proceeded to list all the things she did not want, including her secretarial job, being fifteen pounds “too chubby,” and living at home with her parents.

When she wound down, I threw out the obvious: “So, what do you want?”

Startled, as though she hadn’t expected the question outright, she drew back and gripped her hands in her lap. “I don’t know,” she said.

I waited.

After awhile she said, “Maybe this therapy isn’t such a good idea after all.”

Again, I waited.

“It doesn’t really matter.”

More waiting.

“It’s not possible.”

Silence.

“I probably can’t, anyway.”

Nothing.

Finally, in exasperation, as though she thought me too slow-witted to comprehend anyway, she yelled: “I want to be a rock star!”

“Sounds good to me,” I shouted back.

How come it’s so dangerous to say what we want? After all, it’s a natural act. Kids do it all the time.

As adults, though, it’s risky business to tell the truth about what we want, for two reasons:

1. We’re afraid we can’t have it.
2. We’re afraid we can.

If we imagine we can’t have it, we’re left to deal with all the feelings of undeservability, disappointment, and limitation with which we surround ourselves.

If we decide we can have it, we’re forced to face up to actually doing what it would take to make it happen.

What a rotten double bind. So, what to do? Well, the wise thing, of course. We pretend not to know. Or, we decide not to want anything at all.

Sounds good. In fact, some of us make a case for this as a major step toward enlightenment. Pointing to Eastern philosophies, we note that desire is the root of all suffering, so we’re wise not to want. We declare desirelessness a highly desirable state.

Sounds good. As with all things that sound too good to be true, however, there’s an obvious catch: Pretending to not want does not desireless make.

To consider it another way, here’s a question: Is Mother Hubbard’s dog no longer hungry just because she finds the cupboard bare? Not at all. In fact, the dog with no bone will eventually begin to chew on Mother Hubbard.

Like hungry dogs, we all want. And want. And want. If we pretend we don’t, we either starve or end up unhappily chewing on wrong bones.

True wanting, wishing, and desiring are instruments of our inner guidance system. To ignore them is to deny access to our own hearts.

“Yeah, but what’s the point of admitting what I want?” asked the rock star wannabe. “What are the odds of my actually making it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But all bets are definitely off if you never declare yourself.”

Daring to say what we want gets us unstuck and sets things in motion. It’s also an act of courage because it leads to the next layer of questions: Do we want this for its own sake? Is it our heart’s true desire? Or is it a means to some other end?

Here’s where things get dangerous again. We uncover hidden motives. Things we think we shouldn’t want, maybe, or things we’d like to avoid.

Does the budding rock star genuinely want to sing her heart out on a strobe-lit stage for throbbing crowds? Or is her wish an exciting and elaborate cover plot to escape a boring life that’s too attached to overly protective parents? Either way, saying what she wants leads toward her heart’s truth.

Unless we’re willing to say what we want, we go against ourselves. We deny our heart’s desire. And if we don’t follow our heart’s desire, I think we relinquish joy.

Risky business, all right.

My first reaction was rather dismissive: “Well, she had a long life, and it was time,” I told myself. Not until I passed the news on to my husband did my mixed bag of feelings surface.

“Oh, no!” Fred mourned. “Things won’t be the same around here. I’ll miss her.”

I felt a colossal stab of guilt. I wasn’t so sure I’d miss the nosy old lady across the street who loved gossip and watched us like a hawk.

Fred said he’d miss the early morning ritual of moving her newspaper from lawn to doorstep. He’d miss the evening ritual of waving as he passed her kitchen window on the way home.

He recalled admiring her dual-purpose band saw, which she used to split frozen filet mignon into manageable portions to fit her dwindling appetite—and to cut metal tubes for her distinctive wind chime creations.

He wondered how it would be to raise our flag on a national holiday without Marge hoisting hers in response. That was their arrangement because he was usually more sure of what day it was than she was.

No more sprinklers to fix. No more taking her baby blue 1966 “mint condition” Thunderbird out on the freeway for exercise. No more first-hand town history tales.

I felt terrible. Bad that I wasn’t as caring as Fred. Sad that I was supposed to feel differently than I did. Mad there was no way to avoid sorting out the truth of my relationship, or lack of it, with Marge.

Fred went off to telephone a neighbor for details. I tuned the TV to Jeopardy! and competed for answers to easier questions while pounding veal into see-through scaloppini.

After dinner, as I pulled the living room shade, I realized I had never lowered or raised it in four years without thinking of Marge. Without concern about closing her out or wondering about letting her in.

Shortly after we moved in, Marge invited us to her cocktail hour: one Bombay gin martini straight up with a Spanish olive. From her kitchen counter, the view took us straight through our own picture window across the way. Fred called it her command post. From her perch, she could keep tabs on everyone in the neighborhood.

When she came for tea, she told me her life story “except for the really sexy parts,” which she wanted to save so she’d have something new to tell later on. Soon I realized our “conversations” were one-sided. She chattered—about sex, death, other people, her short marriage, loneliness—and I listened. If I tried to talk, she would point out she didn’t have her hearing aid in. When I finally understood she needed more from me than I could give willingly, I pulled away.

Although I still waved as I passed her window, or stopped for quick hellos, all major communication happened through Fred. He can chat and easily say good-bye in ways that I cannot.

Birthday cards, garden tomatoes, fresh-baked cookies, well wishes—all crossed the road via Fred Express. I wondered how she felt, until Fred reported a message clearly intended for me: “Marge says she understands Gemini people are fickle.”

Remembering that, I decided we’d had a relationship too complex to sort out. I finished closing the shades and went to bed.

A few days later, I waved automatically as I drove past the command post. Without warning, I burst into tears.

No return wave. No smiling face in the window. No raised martini glass. No Marge.  A hole in the universe.

I knew more about what Fred missed: a part of our lives gone, some kind of security whisked away, home base changed forever. But I also felt something deeper. A part of me had gone with her. A part of her remained behind. Beneath our differences lay the inseparable connectedness of us all.

As I got out of the car, I heard the clear tones of the wind chimes Marge had made for us with her band saw.

Whenever my mother dug up a lie I thought was safely buried in kryptonite, she’d say, lips smugly pursed, “A little birdie told me.”

Needless to say, my view of birds in those days ran more to the image of ratfink than to feathered friend. Later, though, the ancient wisdom of other cultures taught me how to listen differently, how to appreciate birdspeak.

And now, the birds have revealed yet another talent in their repertoire of communication skills. Their lesson unfolded a few days ago when my husband stopped me on my way through our sunroom.

“Don’t spray that tree with the hose,” he said, pointing through the French doors toward a dwarf pine in the courtyard garden.

I’ve lived with Fred, master of indirect communication, long enough to know he could be bouncing commands to himself off of me.

Besides, innocence was mine. I rarely touch a hose unless the house is on fire. And, as the whole neighborhood knows, it’s Fred who suffers withdrawal pangs when drought warnings curtail his beloved weekend escapades as Hoseman.

So I didn’t take the bait. I asked, “Why not?”

“They’re building a nest.” He pulled me closer to the window, and I saw a flicker of brown feathers.

“The male is the bigger one with the red breast,” he said. “The little drab brown one is the female.”

He looked at me pointedly, and I knew that he was continuing our argument of last night about whether to get new shutters put on the house. It was a simple dispute made complex by the nature of opposites. His basic philosophy claims “More is better.” Mine runs more to “When in doubt, leave it out.”

Continuing with his bird lore as a way of indirectly assessing my shutters IQ, Fred asked, “How come in nature it’s the male bird that’s always the beautiful one?”

In that moment, he looked to me every bit like a showy peacock with tail fully fanned. What I heard through the translation in my head was “What do you mean, you think we should just rip the two existing shutters off the house rather than add new ones to the bare windows?”

So I took the bait.

“Because the male is all ego and pride,” I shot back. “It’s the female who knows humility.”

“Oh? So what’s humility?”

“Have you ever experienced what it’s like to know you’re about to lay an egg, and there’s not a thing you can do about it?”

His eyes widened. “That sounds like humility, all right!”

He took a minute to collect his defense: “Then why do women paint themselves and wear those wild earrings?”

“So men can see them!” The words flew out of my mouth like crazed hummingbirds. “The male is so arrogant and stuck on himself that the female has to do something to get noticed. Meanwhile” (I was really on a roll) “she’s also out there laying all those eggs and keeping the world going around.”

Silence.

“I never thought of it that way,” he said.

“Me either.” I felt a little singed by my own hot air. In a war of words, it always looks as if I win.

We watched the birds. The red-breasted one brought a twig to the waiting beak of the little brown one and flew off again for another. There was a grace to their quiet cooperation.

No arrogance in her humility. No pride in his beauty.

A peacefulness settled between us, and I realized the truth about the shutters. The truth is, I have little interest in and even less talent for house decor. Particularly the outsides of houses. I guess I thought women are supposed to be naturally good at that. But it’s Fred who is the home beautifier.

The red-breasted bird sailed into the tree with another offering for the nest. Fred and I leaned against each other, my shoulder nudging his in apology as we watched. Sometimes the little things are the toughest to tell the truth about.

“You’re right about the shutters,” I offered.

“Thank you,” he said. “And you’ve got a great way with words.”

“I can’t get anywhere,” Ken said. “I think they made up that phrase ‘dime a dozen’ just to describe writers in New York.”

Then he told me he had a story stuck in his computer that was a spell check away from finished.

“I can’t get myself to finish it,” he said. “They’re only paying $80.”

Of course, you and I know what to tell him. We’d say, “Are you nuts? Just finish it, send it in, and use the $80 to pay the phone bill.”

But the truth is, Ken knows that, too. How come we don’t act on what we know when life gets difficult?

Maybe it has something to do with that expression we all know: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” I don’t like it. I think most of us are already too tough.

No, I prefer my cosmic Jell-O approach. It’s a way of working in tune with the universe rather than forcing something out at gunpoint. It requires a shift of perspective.

Dancing on Cosmic Jell-O

I imagine consciousness as an infinite sea of Jell-O. We’ve all got a spot on it, and when we dance in tune with our own particular rhythm right where we are, our wave reverberates through the whole cosmos. What comes back around to us, from an unexpected direction, is what we need. Of course, it may not be what we thought we wanted.

There’s a trick to cosmic Jell-O dancing. You step with positive intent and wide-eyed expectancy. You glide, opening to all possibilities. You whirl without hanging on to how you think it’s got to turn out. (For a more sophisticated version, check out Carl Jung on synchronicity, Lao-tsu on the Tao, or even Catherine Ponder on prosperity.)

I first experienced it as a kid back when Jell-O was a major food group.

When I was thirteen, I set out one Saturday to get a job. My mother thought this an overly optimistic enterprise in our little Idaho mining town where times weren’t just tough, they were desperate. But I interviewed every shopkeeper on Main Street and beyond.

They all said no.

I remember standing at the end of the street as dusk descended, reassessing what was important in my life. Proving my mother wrong clearly outweighed money. So did doing anything that might make me popular by the time I got to high school.

Decision made, I went back to the House of Flowers and told Mrs. Griffith that hers was the best business in town and that I would be working for her after school and on Saturdays. For free.

She protested. I admired her corsage technique. (She used glitter-edged net puffs amongst the roses and carnations. Any high school girl with a shoulder to pin them on wore Mrs. Griffith’s creations on dance dates.)

She hesitated. I assured her my future depended on glitter. (Somehow corsage proximity would transform me into a Popular Girl.)

She agreed. After a few weeks of free sweeping and dusting, I was on the payroll and up to my elbows in glitter. But I was never Homecoming Queen.

What I got instead was an unshakable confidence that I could make something happen in the world just by being me. By dancing right where I was.

Unfortunately, this is not something once learned, never forgotten. Over the years, I’ve left a lot of skid marks on the Jell-O.

Fear breeds amnesia. So when I get scared I forget about anything cosmic, come to a dead stop, and sink. The way out, I’ve discovered, is to tell the truth about my predicament, unhook my objecting mind, and give my whole heart to what’s in front of me.

Once when I did this, I took a temporary job that could scarcely pay the rent. The job never got any better, but I did meet my future husband.

So—what if Ken were to unhook his mind, run the spell checker, hop a train, and personally deliver his story? Maybe this isn’t about $80. Maybe it’s about a cosmic Jell-O ride into town.

How do I know this? Because our ordinary everyday lives contain all the secret ingredients we need for great relationships, creativity, life purpose, love, joy, adventure and all the personal growth we could ever care to imagine. We just need to know how to see them, how to pay attention to them.

There’s an Open Secret here and we need to put on a pair of 4D glasses to see it. Because the truth is simple–and elusive. It’s as though the truth is too simple for us. We can look right at it and not see it. We can experience it and not know it. We can think we’re telling it even when we’re not. It’s like being stuck in a box with the “how-to-open” instructions written on the outside.

I hope you will join me because I know we’ll have a good time getting out of the box. And who knows, you could have one of those forehead slapping, blinding flash-of-the-obvious moments in the very next instant of now!

Did you see her at the end of last year confess to being fat again, even though we all could see the obvious?

Did you tune in early in January when she opened up this year’s weight loss “challenge” with her master coach Bob Green because you, too, had gained weight?

Had you already vowed since hearing the year-end confession that you, too, would tackle the annual struggle to lose weight again, finally, at last, etc.?

Well, me too.

And now here it is the middle of April and I think I’ve gained another ten pounds since the vow.

Just to show you how old this ongoing saga is for me, I’m going to print the Simple Truths newspaper column I wrote way back when Oprah declared the weight thing over for her. The time she got into the really skinny jeans. Here it is:

Oprah, Me, and Never Say Never

I’ve lost thirty-five pounds.

Again.

Lost implies that I, like Bo Peep with her sheep, should be out looking for them. I’ve always obliged in the past.

“I’d prefer not to this time,” I told my friend Jill, for whom this was no news flash. That’s the wonder of good friends, particularly those who struggle with similar problems. They let you say the same things over and over until you don’t need to any more.

“Maybe I’ll write a column,” I said.

“You’re going to write about that,” Jill said calmly, in that neutral way that therapists have of using statements to ask questions. We do it with each other when we’re on sensitive terrain.

What she wanted to say, I figured, was “What? You’re going to write about that! Have you forgotten Oprah?”

Of course, I remember Oprah. What woman over the age of twelve doesn’t recall Oprah Winfrey’s celebrated 67-pound weight loss? What woman who’s ever despaired about her own dress size doesn’t know that the Queen of Talk Shows gained it back? All this before the greedy eyes of millions of TV viewers.

When she pranced onstage in her prized size eight (or was it size ten?) Calvin Klein jeans, I remember thinking, “Don’t say it, Oprah. Don’t say it.”

But she did. She said something had “clicked,” and she knew she would never be fat again.

Her ace in the hole for maintaining her new slim figure was tabloid fear. The media would mock any gain, ounce by ounce.

They did, and so did we.

Were you one of us who took Oprah’s measurements with our eyeballs, who watched her girth broaden millimeter by millimeter?

At the time, both Jill and I were dressing out of the side of the closet where the fat clothes live. My Evil Twin actually rooted for Oprah to blow it and blimp right back up there with all the rest of the 95 percent of us dieters who’ve ever reclaimed pounds at the Lost and Found.

Over the following months, our VCRs recorded Oprah’s mid-afternoon shows, and our Evil Twins compared notes:

“Her face looked pudgy, today.”

“New chin coming.”

“Bigger in the hips, definitely.”

Inspecting her body relieved us from attending to our own.

Watching this brilliant, successful, lovable woman gain weight on national television reminded us, in a bigger-than-life way, that this is not about brainpower. (Oprah is not stupid, and neither are we.) Nor is it about willpower. (Oprah revealed majestic strength by not eating for months, and so have we.) Nor is it about information power. (Oprah knows all about calories, fat grams, and aerobics, just as we do.)

At last, on her show Oprah confessed to what everyone in TVland already knew. She was fat again. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said.

I felt badly about my Evil Twin’s ugly wishes, for I, too, know that this is the hardest thing.

After losing and regaining the same thirty-five pounds over and over for as many years, what gives me (or anyone) the courage to hope that this time is different?

Each time, I’ve uncovered something new within myself that has informed the next time. Hope lies in that, in the difference between a vicious circle and what I call a learning spiral.

When we’re caught in a vicious circle, our repeating patterns bring us back to the exact same place. When we’re riding a learning spiral, no matter how familiar it seems when we come round again, we’re not in the same spot. We’ve moved up a level. Growth has taken place.

For many of us who suffer with food obsessions and/or major weight swings, the question is not so much “What should I do?” in behavior and lifestyle terms. We already know volumes about eating less and exercising more.

The real question is “How come I can’t do what I know?” There’s a mystery here for each of us to track down. It’s as individual as we are and involves discovering our own inner connections and necessities as they’re acted out through misuse of food.

I can say, as I did to Jill, that I’d prefer not to repeat this pattern. But I know to never say “never” about being fat again. I also know to always say “always” about learning from the process.

I think Rumi best captures the very nature of The Yellow in this simple sentence: “The soul is here for its own joy.”

But of course, if the word “joy” said it all for this essential energy, we wouldn’t need to call it The Yellow. You can get closer to the meaning when you consider that we experience The Yellow through our wonder and delight. We open to it when we say “I wish” or “I want” with a light and playful heart. We engage it through our curiosity and by following our heart’s desire.

The Yellow inspires any creative process, provides enthusiasm on any real adventure, and shows up as our own open presence in any Lucid Moment.

Getting Curious About The Yellow

The best way to begin to understand the subtle energies of The Yellow is to fasten your wide-open mind onto a small child at play. Watch her explore her world. She knows what she wants with her whole heart, and she goes right for it. A child knows Joy up close and personal because she knows the pure pleasure of enjoyment from the inside out.

On the way to becoming adults we lose contact with wonder, delight and heart’s desire. We get conditioned to see things in certain ways, and we build a lot of self-protecting mind locks that become barriers to the subtle energies.

Some of the specific blocks to The Yellow include our attachments, our fear of disappointment, all the ways we hold our feelings back and our fear of self-expression. One of the biggest blocks to The Yellow is ordinary old garden-variety doubt.

How to Invite The Yellow Back

Essential states pour into the open spaces that invite them. In other words, we can’t force Joy to show up. But we can open ourselves to The Yellow, and some ways to do that include:

• Practicing being present to the moment.
• Engaging our curiosity as a way to dissolve blocks to The Yellow.
• Rediscovering our true heart’s desire.

What’s your experience with The Yellow? Are there ways you know you block joy?

It seems that when Magellan sailed the coast of South America into the straits that now bear his name, the natives didn’t see him coming. Mind you, the heroic Portuguese explorer took five ships crewed by 260 seamen on this epic voyage that crossed the last great unknown ocean. How could five ships be invisible?

Well, the natives didn’t see the ships because it was the early 16th century and they’d never seen ships before. They saw only what they already knew. The billowing sails blended into cloud formations, the hulls rose and fell into the sea’s natural waves.

Remarkable to imagine, isn’t it?

Couldn’t happen now, though. Could it? Not in the 21st century, certainly. I mean, the world’s all been mapped now, hasn’t it?

And then again, maybe not. After all, we experience the world with the senses we know–sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing. What if something else exists right here that’s unknown to our ordinary ways? Are ships sailing by that we’re calling clouds because we don’t understand?

I think so. But what we’re not seeing is not physical. It’s spiritual. It’s experiential. It’s our essential presence, which is always there even when we don’t know it.

Open Secrets Hidden in Plain Sight

On an everyday ordinary level, an open secret is something you just don’t get. It’s hidden to you. But since other people seem to get it, it must be visible to them.

My favorite example of this phenomenon is my vast collection of diet books. Every one of those books represents at least one person who got the “it” that made them thin. Meanwhile, many of the rest of us are still groping around for the key that unlocks the vault to the Big Secret. In other words, we still don’t get “it.” And it’s right there in plain sight.

A Lucid Moment is an open secret suddenly revealed. Just because we didn’t get the aha! ten minutes (or ten years) before doesn’t mean it wasn’t always available to us. Did Rip van Winkle cause the world to begin by waking up?

The Five Subtle Secrets

There are five essential qualities that we need when we undertake–as true soul work–any creative project, relationship or inner development. I call them the Five Subtle Secrets, but they are taught one way or another in all major spiritual traditions from Adam to Zen.

Although I am not a Sufi, I love the Sufi way of illuminating these subtle qualities through color:

• Yellow is the Joy essence
• Red is the Strength essence
• White is the Will essence
• Black is the Peace essence
• Green is the Compassion essence

These five subtle energies symbolized by the colors are essential aspects of our true nature, our true self. They are always present. Always.

When we’re awake to them, these subtleties arise in our experience as needed. But they seem to be held secret from us because we don’t remember they’re there when we actually need them. We once knew as children, but as our personalities developed we lost touch.

The good news is that the blocks to the subtle energies (our habitual ways of being, our defensive structures, our fears) can be used as gateways into the particular essential experiences that they hide.

I’ll tell you more about how these essential qualities arise in us and how they can help us “get what we just don’t get” in future posts. Meanwhile, I wonder. What seems like an open secret to you in your life?

Well, maybe everybody doesn’t always like mysteries, especially those times when you happen to be lost in one yourself. I guess nobody likes the kind of mystery that starts off with lines like these:

• “Why on earth would you do a thing like that?”
• “Who stole my blue cashmere sweater?”
• “What happened to the front of your car?”

But I don’t know anybody who can pass up a mystery story that’s got great stuff in it like hidden passageways, lost diaries, code names, dusty trunks in musty attics, stolen love letters, secret gardens or rusty keys.

Particularly, I don’t know anyone who isn’t interested in buried treasure. Almost everyone can be lured into adventure by the possibility of uncovering emeralds and rubies, diamonds and pearls, gold and silver doubloons.

So, given all this, here’s a curious question: How is it that so many of us wander through life tripping over buried treasure without even noticing that we’ve stubbed a toe?

Maybe We Need to Redefine Treasure

To borrow a manner of speaking from Pogo, “I have seen the buried treasure and it is us.” Since we’re on a roll we might as well redefine mystery, too. “And I have seen the mystery and it, too, is us.”

Being in the mystery and being the mystery at the same time. Being both the question and the answer, the problem and the solution. Being the seeker and that for which we’re looking. This is strange business all right. Or, as Rumi says, “We are the strange business.”

Let’s imagine that each moment of our lives, each story that we tell holds a treasure waiting to be discovered. Don’t you think we’re nuts to miss out on so much just because we’re not paying attention or because we don’t like what’s happening in our moments or our stories? I imagine us refusing emeralds and rubies, rejecting diamonds and pearls, sending back those gold and silver doubloons.

Every Moment Has Its Own Lucid Possibility

Lucid Moments can take many forms. Perhaps something quietly resonates all through you, and you say, simply, “Oh.” Or, out of nowhere some profound dazzling new idea whacks you on the head like a lightening bolt and you say, “Oh!” Or, maybe you run into something you’ve seen a thousand times, and you say, “Oh?”, as in “I never thought of that before.” With any of these “Oh’s” you end up thinking about it for awhile, until a felt sense shifts inside, and then you realize you know something you didn’t know before.

I think most of us don’t want to delve too far into the mystery or dig too deeply for buried treasure for fear of the pain that sometimes comes with the gold. So, each of us has our own Lucid Moments locked up in our untold stories. But they’re worth telling. As Isak Dinesen, who wrote Out of Africa, says: “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”

It seems to me that our stories hold untold power either to keep us stuck in old ways of being or set us free for something new. Almost all our stories can be either prison stories or inspirational stories. It all depends on how we tell them.

So I wonder. How open are you to the mystery of your own life? How open are you to uncovering the treasure buried in your own stories?