[[What to Remember When Waking]] ## From the Mountain From the mountain, the earth stood revealed, not only by its beckoning and endless forms, not only in the way my body stood at last  at the center of that endless, radiating, horizon, but for this: that I had understood something beneath all understanding, that I had touched  the untouchable and unspoken freedom  where every sense of liberty begins, that every path  descending from that high and rocky eminence now  led where every previous fear refused to go,  not out from me, to every far horizon, but inward  from each and every single edge of the world I saw, returning, like a living light, into the very center  of my body. Something that had once been mine,  now broken open at its center like a sky, opened  and generous to everything that could live  beneath it. My new sense of self suspended  like passing, light-filled clouds, my voice as patient  as the rain, giving life to every fallow ear,  and every fallow field, my inward sense of deep affection  for every blessed living creature, like the sunlight  of an earned forgiveness, forgiveness for the difficult way that each of us must come, and for all the ways  it is always so hard for us to love, or speak that love,  or be that flowing sense of giving  and happy receiving, like a river or a lake or the music  of falling water, going home merely by following the beautiful gravitational invitation to keep falling, so hard for us to hear the rain that way, just  now descending on the mountain, or in our city streets,  gathering to itself, secretly and patiently,  and moment by moment, the source of every stream,  and always, always, just beyond our understanding, from every single mountain and river and the tiniest  almost hidden, onward stream, the ocean beyond,  growing daily, with every single generous drop. --- ## [[Crossing the Unknown Sea]] We might say, as we attempt to construct something enduring in our own lives, that speed is a sin as constraining as cement. Speed seems to speak of movement but it actually glues us into whatever immobile, unattending identity we have constructed. The moment we stop the constant willful building, the edifice of our work falls down. (p. 121)