A Salute to the Mist

a devotional for autumn

Thank you for joining us!

Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:

Last week’s discussion prompted some beautiful meditation from all of you about the relationships we build (or don’t build) with those who have departed this life. I loved reading all of your responses! Today I’d like to highlight Moth Lyn, who commented:

I have to say that, coming from a non-religious family, the visitation is really the only ceremony after someone has passed. I have seen the way my family cuts off the relationship with their dead, just as they had bc with God, and eventually as they did to each other. Because of this, the only experience I have (really) with death is those outside of my family that have passed -- and I started to shut down to that as well, just as I had seen my whole life. It is only recently, as I progress on my spiritual journey, that I get comfortable with this idea, and start to honor those I know who have passed. I don’t set them a seat at my table, but I do have a space for them in my studio, and I’ve begun to mention them in my daily prayers. I’m hoping there can be healing for me as well as other members of my family.

Thank you for digging so deeply to respond this way, Moth! Moth Lyn is a fellow Substack writer who shares beautiful pieces about journaling as a spiritual practice and healing through art at the newsletter Starmoth’s Wild Faith. I highly recommend it!

If you want a chance to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!

Now, on with this week’s devotional…

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in the morning
the train of the night-queen's robe
grows fragile
as she passes

and lies heavily on the hills
and drifts into somber valleys
where unnamed saints
of fur and feather
once lived and preached
and now
are buried;

this mist
this prophet-mist
is born to pass

obscuring details
speaking in tongues
softening
everything;

keeping silence
and feeding a holy hush

a cathedral
with roof of cloud
and altar-paths
underfoot.

As October leads into November we start to wake to mistier and mistier mornings, draped in thick fog from the not-so-distant ocean. It lingers from first light to right around lunchtime, when the thin autumn sun slowly burns it away.

I’ve always loved mist. It has a certain romance to it. It forces your perspective close, keeping everything in the background indistinct. All you can see is what is immediately in front of you. Clarity is not guaranteed until you move onward, into the fog, deeper into mystery.

Is it any coincidence that the word mist bears such similarity to the word mystery?

Actually, yes. It is a coincidence. (Sorry about that.)

Disappointingly, from what etymological research we have available to us, mist and mystery don’t share a common root or even a common history. Which I find funny, and a little strange.

Regardless, the words are related because of circumstance, if not by origins. Mystery is obscured, and mist obscures. But while mist resolves and eventually blows away after hours, or perhaps days, there is no such guarantee with mystery.

Some mysteries are not meant to be solved.

In the autumn, as we walk deeper into the year’s darker half, mist becomes a teacher. All of life is taken one step at a time, while all else is obscured. Some mysteries we will never solve, but mists will part as we move forward. On and on, bit by bit, clarity is revealed through movement, not stillness.

Autumn is the color-filled playground of the God who is both God of Mist and the God Behind the Mist, and each step we take is a testament to His holy gifts: alternating, clarity and mystery, back and forth, onward into the mist in a perfect providential dance.

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