exposed roots

I am in New Zealand, on a footpath through some woods, next to a small river. And what has caught my attention are the roots of trees. Here, because of the footpath I guess, there are many exposed roots. And I've come to a patch where these roots are completely entwined with each other, crisscrossing, as if forming a complex structure. It's like a work of art, quite abstract.

Seeing these roots, crisscrossing each other in this way, it reminds me of some ongoing scientific research, as to how trees communicate with each other, chemically, through their root system. It's an information network of some sort, but we don't really understand it, or the implications of vast networks of trees. Perhaps it's a bit like a brain – we just don't know.

Of course these roots normally are hidden from view, and that's what's really coming to me in this moment. There's so much unseen in the world. We can very easily fall into the trap of thinking that we know the world, that we can see everything. It is not so. There is much that is hidden from our view. There is much we do not understand.

I applaud science in its efforts to uncover more and more of nature's wonders, to gain deeper and deeper technical understanding of the interactions between things. We should not let that blind us, though, to the fundamental point, which is life is profoundly a mystery. And though some of life's mysteries can be revealed to us, like these roots on this forest path, there are aspects of the mystery of life that are not to be understood in a technical way.

It's this essential mystical aspect that is really at the core of life. And we should not be upset about that. It's very challenging, for us as a human being, to acknowledge that there are some things we can never know. If we can surrender to that, though, if we can surrender to the mystery of life, then in that very surrender we find ourself immersed in the mystery, not separate from it. We too are a part of this great mystery of life.

This is what these entangled, entwined, exposed roots are reminding me of this morning.