The Radical Uncertainty That Underpins

 I had no sooner written my former post on the regenerative power of understories than I was met with the phrase: “The radical uncertainty that underpins our lives”

It appeared in a discussion about time and timelessness which took place between a Christian and a Muslim who had both faced down and incorporated cancer into their life understories. (Onbeing podcast)

Somewhere or somehow in that mining of the understory they had each faced fully the “radical uncertainty”, of the unseen, unknown. Most often that underpinning has not been explored and hence may cause anxiety or fear. But the conversation referenced above caused me to think of the many Covid conversations to which I have been a witness in which radical uncertainty was transformed or became the transformer of doubt into faith, despair to courage.

I suppose one of the keys is to lean into the encounter. Not to name it or trap it but to accept and learn from it. The poem below by the Japanese poet Izumi Shikibut encourages, en-courages, this countercultural effort:

As I dig for wild orchids

in the autumn fields,

it is the deeply-bedded root

that I desire, 

not the flower.