Poem for the week: "Life Is a Puzzle"

Life Is a Puzzle

Life is a puzzle. Everyone says it is, and our life

proves it to be so; and experience after experience,

we live and learn, but never enough to solve the

mystery. There seems to always be one more piece

to the puzzle; and that’s life. If one has lived enough,

experienced enough, read enough, searched enough,

and found enough pieces to the puzzle, one can almost

make sense of life and longs for that one piece that

will put it all together; but what could that be? Poets,

philosophers, and scientists have devoted their life

to this missing piece, but never finding it. What could

it be? The God particle? The I Am principle of life?

Could that be the missing piece of life’s puzzle?

“Know thyself,” said the Oracle of Delphi, which

Socrates made central to his philosophical inquiry;

and if so, what is it about the self that we need

to know? Could our I, the self that we all long to be

(poet, doctor, singer), be a seed like any other, sown

on Earth by the Creator (the Source, God, or whatever),

encoded to realize its own potential, like the acorn seed

that becomes an oak tree? And if so, what is the I of our

individuating self endowed to be? Is that the missing

piece of the puzzle, the DNA of our essential nature?

Is that the purpose of our existence, to realize the

encoded potential of the human self? And what

could that possibly be, if not love?