You can step into mystery wherever you are, with an open, curious wonder. Here you are, on this astonishing planet, in this spiral galaxy, with language and love and an invitation to see.

• Lie outside on the grass on a warm starlit night. Imagine that you are at the bottom of the turning world (there really is no top or bottom), held on by the magnet of gravity. Look up into the infinite sea of stars.

• Hold your breath for a minute or more. Feel how your body finally insists on breathing. It is ever breathing, living with the air that dusts mountaintops and passes across oceans, through the lungs of deer, the leaves of oaks and maples, automobile engines, and the South Pole. Feel how you are part of the earth breathing.

• Ask yourself: How did you get here in this human life? What is mind? What is love? What will happen next month? When will you die? What is death? Where do stars come from? What will the human world look like in twenty-five years?

Pause after each question and let the feeling of 'don't know' open you to mystery. Relax and enjoy the mystery, rest in the vast mystery that holds and supports you and all life. You are the mystery seeing itself.

• Contemplate the mystery of your body. The trillion patterns of synaptic connections in your brain, the 100 trillion bacteria in your gut. Your liver is processing a million complex reactions right now, your body is awash in fluids and tubes of blood and lymph and bile and urine and spinal fluid, all flowing like the infrastructure of Manhattan. And all collaborating in a mysterious dance to protect your life.

• Look into the eyes of a young child. See the child of the spirit, the mystery born into this new form. Where did they come from? What will they become?

• Get a teaspoon of soil. It has a billion bacteria, millions of fungi, hundreds of thousands of microarthropods, thousands of protozoa and nematodes. More life in one spoonful than on all of the other planets combined.

• Go to a cemetery. Contemplate death.

• Go to a dating website. Contemplate desire and love.

— Jack Kornfield in No Time Like the Present