Our family is spending the weekend at a friend's ranch near Uvalde, on thousands of acres of rolling hills and cactus nestled along the Nueces River.  The ranch house is located at the end of a long, dusty driveway, several miles from the nearest road.  The nearby swimming hole looks tempting and the house is fully equipped with all the entertainment options of home, but what I enjoy most is going off by myself on long walks in splendid, total isolation.  There's not a single, human-generated sound to be heard; no voices, no cars, no airplanes overhead, nothing but the sound of my own footsteps in an otherwise silent landscape.  Or so it seems.  But once I stop moving, stand still and focus for awhile, I realize that this seemingly empty mesquite thicket is actually filled with sounds that have merely been drowned out by the loudest noise of all:  the chattering of my monkey-mind, churning out its endless stream of memories, fantasies and judgments.  Just noticing this fact allows me to turn down the inner noise level and tune in to the rich chorus of voices all around: wild turkeys gobbling, cardinals chirping, crows calling, cicadas drumming, leaves fluttering, deer snorting and the random scritch-scratching of some small critter crawling through the underbrush.  Odd.  Just a few steps ago, this landscape seemed totally silent, but now it's filled with a majestic symphony!
 
Much later, long after everyone else has gone to bed for the night, I'm drawn back outdoors to do some stargazing. Viewing conditions are ideal out here, with a mere sliver of fingernail moon hanging in the cloudless sky and the nearest city lights many miles away.  Mesmerized by the sight of all those twinkling lights above, I suddenly recall that although it looks like I'm staring at a gazillion stars, the human eye can actually see fewer than 6,000 celestial bodies on even the clearest night.  Moreover, most of what we can see is actually located in our own small galaxy, the Milky Way, which contains over 400 billion stars, and is only one of at least 100 billion galaxies known to exist in the observable universe! 
 
For the second time today, my monkey mind is stunned into silence by a pointed reminder that whatever I think I perceive is but a small fraction of what there is to perceive. In any given situation, whether I'm out here relaxing in this wide-open space or zooming around at my city-pace, it's quite likely that whatever I think I know is just a fraction of "what I don't know," which pales in comparison to everything I don't know that I don't know.
 
In delivering this humbling reminder, the stars above and the symphony of sounds all around are inviting me (and you?) to keep an open mind and an open heart in the face of the Great Mystery which sustains and surrounds us every moment, every day, everywhere. Whether dealing with a sore hangnail or a disturbing e-mail, with friends and family or the nation's economy, the question remains the same:  Can you let go of the known and embrace a willingness to be shown that so much more is possible?
 
That's my question, and I'm sticking to it.
 
With blessings,