Mental Jigsaw Puzzle

Step out onto the Planet Draw a circle 100 feet round.

Inside the circle are 300 things Nobody understands and, Maybe nobody ever sees.

Lew Welsh was a member of a trio of beat poets. Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew met at Reed College. When Gary and Philip became famous in 1955, Lew was in Chicago recovering from a nervous breakdown.

Welsh’s poem is a mind tickler. Trying to absorb everything around us is a difficult task. We compensate for our lack by living in a world of familiar things. We accept what we believe and throw everything else in a pile of uncertainty. We rarely dig through that pile. Our individual world is a partial glance of consciousness. There are other worlds around us, but we choose not to focus on them unless something triggers our awareness. Awareness is a complicated companion. It’s rooted in a mental jigsaw puzzle that contains much more than three hundred things. We don’t see the pieces in the puzzle until we acknowledge them.

Our jigsaw puzzle is constantly changing. We like to think we have a working knowledge of the puzzle, but we don’t. We wrap our ego in a shroud of camouflage, and avoid a lot of pieces. Our jigsaw puzzle always has an element of blank in it. We accept that element using faith. Faith is our "I don't understand the puzzle card." Faith gives the self permission to avoid what we don’t understand. Faith is the piece that no one sees and rarely understands.