"I want to be a mystic," he said.

"What kind of career is that?" she asked.

"Well, it isn't a career exactly,
it's more of a way to be."

She snorted,
"A way to be.
And that pays…how much?"

He ignored her sarcasm,
because at this point,
he simply wanted to hear himself
state his own truth:
"A mystic witnesses to
the wildness of God.
A mystic knows God,
not through words about God,
but by being lost in God,
tumbled, jumbled, tossed, twisted,
like fish in the rapids,
or fragments of an exploding star.
A mystic knows God is silence
and the absence beyond silence.
God is undoing,
and in God, a mystic, too, is undone."

It didn't bother him,
the blank stare she gave him.
He recognized this language was foreign,
even to him,
and knew it,
therefore,
to be true.

Text and image © 2012 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.