There is a magic of intersections according to Gaelic legend, where two different worlds meet and the result is the experience of wonder.  The three hidden worlds - The Land Beneath the Earth, The Land Beneath the Water, and The Land of Perpetual Youth - are not ordinarily visible.  However, when, for a moment, they intersect with our own physical reality, we experience something of the Beyond, that which has been and must remain Mystery.  For it is not just 'a' mystery in the smaller sense that can be resolved, but 'Mystery' in the larger sense of the ultimately unknowable.

Intersections fill our lives - places where our own inner world and the world of another intersect producing Mystery.  There is the mystery of the meaning of the moment.  There is the mystery of the inner world of another that is different from our own, and the slim bridge we must cross to both embrace and understand it and yet perceive the remaining difference.  And there is the mystery of time that brings us this intersection for a moment, and then moves it out of the range of our perception, disappearing into what seems like the realm of the past.  All this is Mystery.

Intersections also exist before our eyes in the landscape we behold - the place where trees reaching up to the sky sink their roots into the ground.  The place where one type of earth, and texture, and color becomes another. The place where winter has not quite become spring and yet we feel its presence beneath the snow or within the snow.  In ways both large and small we feel the presence of intersections around us and within us, beckoning us into the presence of Mystery - our existence in time and space that is also of the Beyond.

The simplest of intersections can lie in our conversations with another, especially a beloved other whom we know well.  Here, we can listen for the old narratives and stories that we have heard many times before, and at the same time be completely surprised by something new that pops up among the old tropisms and anecdotes.  This new thing is an 'intersection,' an emergence into the well-worn patterns of thought and feeling of something from another realm, from the soul perhaps, from the Beyond of what has been visible to us before that moment. 

Such intersections of soul with outer self, and then of soul with the soul within us, are among the most precious of life.  They create within an ordinary day the dimensions of depth and height that travels with us through the rest of our day.  They bring our relationships forward because something new has entered them - a new thought, a new perspective, a new emotion.  If we are wise, we look for these intersections from the Beyond of the soul into the realm of the ordinary.  We seek them and we cherish them, for they enrich us and deepen what is possible for us and between us and others with whom we share this planet. 

All intersections are magic.  They bring worlds together and reveal to us something of that which has been hidden from ordinary vision.  And if we begin to seek the Lands of the Beyond, whether they be Beneath the Earth, or Beneath the Water, or in the Realms of the Holy Ones, we do so knowing that the ultimate teaching of all intersections is about the Mystery of that which is hidden thus far, but which, in the next moment, can be further revealed.

Article Section -  A New Consciousness