Today’s Practice
Meet one of the looming, impossible-to-scale mountains within you.
Meet it face-to-face.
Notice its shape, its size, its adamant
vertiginous topography.
Place your hands and your feet on its slippery, scree-lined slope.
Notice the trackless paths you’d have to traverse
to climb its granite body.
Feel its dangers: those scimitar rocks that can slice open an artery–
the thin, unbreathable air that shivers at its peak.
Feel the tremble and lurch, the cold despair the mountain’s shadow
casts on your heart, in your belly.
Feel it.
Call your soul into this fragile communion.
As its sun blazes through, all is illuminated:
The mountain, your lurching heart, the space between you.
Notice your ferrous arms, your powerful, unyielding legs.
Breathe in the sky of your own levitation.
Discern the true shape of the mountain before you.
Feel its curves in the swivel of your hips,
its caves in the secret passages of your body.
Know your self, the mountain.
Know the mountain, your self.
Touch of fingertip on lip.
Intimate mystery.
