Midnight. Can't sleep.

I once swore to myself an oath that I would never act on any decision made past midnight until I was able to evaluate it in the calmer, less wildly imagined world of morning. That vow has kept me in good stead all these years. You can imagine why such an oath would be necessary. I'm already an inventive person, to say the least. Once the shadows roll in and make otherwise far-fetched things seem possible--even reasonable--it is rarely wise to accede to such choices.

For instance, you could find yourself having quit your job, driving across the country in a new RV that you sold your house in order to buy, intent on fulfilling your childhood dream of seeing a regular season home game in every major league ballpark in America and Canada. Such a dream is tantalizing at midnight, after a few beers with friends. It becomes less tantalizing when you're driving an enormous vehicle through crowded Los Angeles freeways trying to figure out how exactly one exits to get to Dodgers Stadium, and how you're going to get up to San Francisco and Oakland on fifteen dollars and a collection of souvenir baseball caps.

Oh, our dreams haunt us. They peck at us, daring us, defying us. Their execution, however, is never quite what we expected.

I worry. I read horror novels and I worry. I wrote a book of horror fiction once, which is now out of print and difficult to find. On the cover is a clinical drawing of a dissected human heart from the 1918 Gray's Anatomy. Using Photoshop,I erased the little callouts labeling the aorta and the septum and the right and left ventricle and replaced them--craftily, I thought--with the names of the stories in the book loosely translated into Latin. On the back cover, in the blurb, is the pulled quote, "Beneath the skin, we are all monsters."

Do not scour your local library for such a book; I can guarantee that you will not find it. The book is out there, however. If you really wanted to, you could figure out from the previous paragraph enough information about it to discover the book, and thus my identity. If you feel the desire to do so, go right ahead. Life is more charming when there's a little mystery to solve.

Midnight is full of mysteries.

Do you ever think about your body? Do you obsess over it, worry at it, complain about its shape, exercise it, tan it, shave it? Or do you hide it in loose-fitting, frumpy clothes, hoping no one will notice? The body is a mystery. Activity at the cellular level happens so swiftly that molecular biologists don't stand a chance of figuring it all out in our lifetimes. We don't know how a single cell works, much less our bodies. Medications, especially psychiatric drugs, are crude bludgeons aimed at our cells, doing God knows what to them. We know that Prozac and Zoloft and Paxil (among others) inhibit the reuptake of a vastly important neurochemical called serotonin. These drugs also affect people's moods beneficially, but science is only at the level of speculation as to why achieving the one achieves the other.

We just don't know. It's a big, fucked-up mystery.

At the doctor's office today (I have the flu), I saw a medical diagram of a human hand. It looked like what you'd expect to see if Slim Goodbody had become a hand model for dishwashing liquid. Two hands folded gently over one another, revealing the location of tendons and bones and muscles. It's all quite lovely from a certain point of view. The title of the image: The Miraculous Human Hand. What an amazing discovery, that something so common as the human hand is in some way miraculous, but of course, it is. Can anything else come close to doing what the human hand does so readily, so simply, wordlessly, scarcely without thinking? When I type with my hands, I don't have to think out the spellings of words. I just think the words and my hands type them. Somewhere in the motor cortex of my brain, signals of astonishing complexity are being created at the tip of my wavefront of consciousness and passed down magically, through an equally complex array of chemical and electrical interactions, to my hands. These signals delicately coordinate the several dozen-odd muscles in my hands and make them type.

Have you ever looked at your hands and marvelled at their beauty, their apparent simplicity? Do it now. Hold them up and really look at them. They're so incredible and yet so ridiculously commonplace. You see them everywhere you go. And yet they are, indeed, miracles. I wonder if the person who typed in the title of that doctor's office graphic was expressing real joy at the true awe-inspiring nature of the human hand, or if this is simply they way that such things are named?

Consider this: your mind has no idea how your hand works. It simply considers the motion of the hand, and the hand moves. Your mind spends not a moment wondering how this will be accomplished. Likewise, the cells in your hand muscles and bones and skin, clearly have no concept that they exist within the context of a hand. A cell is a writing vortex of chaos surrounded by membranes. Activity at the cellular level occurs so quickly and with such seeming lack of direction, that scientists doubt they'll be able to make much sense of it in our lifetime. And all of this activity, we know, is directed by twin spirals of paired amino-acids that don't seem to do anything other than direct certain structures in the building of proteins. And from this, all life on earth is composed.

The stunning thing is that there is no part of your body that understands how your hand works. Your motor cortex, that unsung hero of the human mind, comes closest. But it is nothing more than a translator at heart. It reads the language of congnitive volition and composes the ad-hoc programming that will allow your body to do the incredibly complex feats of motion and balance involved in doing something as simple as opening a door, or turning the page in a book, or typing. You motor cortex, we assume, learned this by trial and error during your diapered years. As you whirled your limbs in wild, meaningless circles in your crib, the motor cortex was paying attention, and eventually it sussed out all on its own how to marry the thought to the deed. It did all this for you, with no expectation of a reward. And what have you done for it?

I worry about my hands, but not overmuch. Barring calamity or illness, there isn't much that could happen to impede their work. But such things can and do happen. The editor of Frenche Elle magazine, Jean-Dominique Bauby, suffered a severe stroke that left him almost totally paralyzed. He dictated the manuscript of his book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly to a speech therapist in the following manner: the therapist held a pointer to a special chart of individual letters, arranged by frequency of use. She then moved the pointer across the letters until Bauby blinked his left eye, the only motion left to him. In this way, he wrote a 144 page autobiography. The average printed page holds about 250 words. The average word holds about six letters. You do the math. Better yet, do the math without using your hands.

To me, the religious life has not very much to do with performing rituals and enforcing doctrines. It has much more to do with pursuing the mystery that is God. Entire lives, since the beginning of recorded history, have been dedicated to the mystery of God. If the goal were to pin God down on a dissecting board and label every bit of Him, we'd be in for a challenge. This, however, is not the goal of the religious life. The goal is, rather, to enter into this most basic of mysteries and love the beautiful play of the known against the unknown.

Truly, we are creatures born to such a task. We are evolved to hunt and gather, and a couple dozen centuries of civilization have done little, if anything, to alter our genetic makeup. The only difference is that now we gather knowledge instead of nuts and berries. We hunt the Divine in its many aspects rather than deer and elk. Many of us will happily devote our entire productive lives to this pursuit whether it bears any fruit or not. Some believe that the search is its own reward, that search is itself the end toward which we struggle, that we can never be any more or any less than we are right at this very moment.

There is a type of wasp, called the Sphex wasp who, in its maternal devotions, puts other insects to shame. The mother wasp will dig a tiny burrow for her eggs, then sojourn out to find a plump cricket. When it finds the cricket, it paralyzes the wretched thing and drags it back to the burrow where it will become live feed for the hatched wasp larvae. The behavior is complex and requires quite a number of steps. For instance, at a certain point, the wasp mother will abandon the cricket at the door to its burrow, then hop inside for a look around to make sure everything's okay before dragging the cricket inside. If a bored graduate student, watching this procession, chances to nudge the paralytic cricket away from the burrow, the wasp will gamely retrieve the thing and drag it back to the burrow again. Then, she will hop inside again for a look around to make sure everything's okay. If, when she pops outside again, the graduate student has again relocated the cricket, she will repeat the entire procedure. This very prank was repeated forty-one times at one sitting and each time the wasp responded in precisely the same way. Eventually, the bored graduate student become bored even with this, and moved on to some other, unrecorded shananigans.

This ability that we have to choose our destinies is a remarkable advance in animal terms. The power to dream, to wonder, to believe in miraculous things, to explore the very fabric of the universe, these are stunning things. And like all stunning things, we abuse them when they become too familiar to us. Like our hands, for instance. And of course, often we choose to ignore all of it in favor of our own venial pursuits: television, gossip, bickering, complaining. Worrying.

And yet, regardless of the everyday plenitude of miracles that surrounds us, we cannot help but ask for more. Tonight, while I was putting my three-year-old daughter to sleep, I marveled at the way my splayed left hand covered nearly her entire back. Caught up in this wonder, it occurred to me to ask why God could not have given us the ability to read the contents of another person's heart and soul by touching with our hands. Surely, while God was in there installing the muscles and ligaments and bones, God could have made such an improvement. Or maybe not. I don't know. But I do know that I am often baffled by our isolation as people, the way that we are in so many ways trapped inside these bodies. We can never truly feel what another feels, never truly know what someone else thinks. Our bodies are our physical universes. We can venture no further, except in our imaginations. But we can always embrace the mystery, and the search. In that we are joined.

Our hands embody mystery, and they are capable of creating mystery, and destroying it. There is no limit to what our hands can do; they exhibit more degreees of freedom by far than any human-devised instrument. Fists, open palms, steepled in prayer, joined with the hands of another: these are all possible configurations.

And, of course, typing.

The night wears on and my fingers grow tired. 2:47 am now. Three hours passed for me, and how long for you to read it, five minutes? Enough. Tonight's mysteries will fade and tomorrow's realities will push them aside, as they always have and always shall. These are the seasons of the heart. And within them, all of the other mysteries and realities tumble and spark, eddying and spinning in torrents of divine breath, growing.