mandala

Alone on the side of a mountain in the middle of a dark night, drenched in fog, wind shrieking and flapping, I am afraid of heights and lost. I shuffle around the granite outcrop, looking for the trail, peering into the tiny circle of light from my headlamp, and searching for a sign. Nothing. 

I’m not afraid to fall and die. I’m afraid to fall and not die. I’m afraid to fall and not lose consciousness. To lose not consciousness, but only control, to lose control to gravity, pulling me tumbling down the mountainside, ricocheting off tree trunks and banging into boulders, and not losing consciousness. Instead, lying there impossibly twisted and broken like a fallen satellite, like plane wreckage, waiting for someone to find me. But nobody knows I’m here. 

I scuttle back to what I imagine is the center and try again in a different direction. But each foray leads me to a precipice. Soon I cannot remember what I’ve tried and what I have not. The wind will not stop screaming at me. Please stop. 

I kneel in despair, then place my hands on the ground so that I am on all fours like an animal, like a baby. It is as if the gravity of my fear forces me to the ground, presses me to the cold rock, and pushes my face against the rough face of the mountain. I breathe. 

Then I notice that I am breathing. I inhale the damp petrichor. I feel the granite against my cheek, somehow softer than I expected, the cool stone comforting, as if the mountain itself, after my involuntary prostration, were cradling me. 

Breathing more slowly, eyes open, close against the stone, I feel as a comforting anchor the weight of the mountain and its unfathomable history: blown up from equatorial waters 350 million years ago, drifting and smashing and rounding over uncountable generations of nonhuman existence. How many stars have shone here before flickering out? How many ocean waves have crashed on this very place?    

And then it is as if the mountain were whispering to me. The wind fades, and I hear, or I feel as if I hear these words: I am the ancient ground; I am the ancient earth. You cannot lose me. Just keep contact.

My plans, I realize with relief, do not matter. It doesn’t matter where I wind up or when, whether at the top or the bottom, broken or whole. What do these words mean to the earth?

This, I now see, is why I am on this mountain. I now belong to an ancient tribe of outcasts pulled to the mountain’s mass and height. Entering its hidden, dark chambers, laden with treasure and terror, and emerging to make the arduous ascent to a place that seems closer to heaven, a place of revelation and transition, of transformation, a place to encounter the divine, even if only in the flames of a burning bush or the gleam of a new day’s first light. 

The slowly moving masses upon which our continents and even our oceans rest are known as “tectonic plates.” “Tectonic” comes from the Greek word tekton, which means carpenter or builder, and from which we get our word architect. However, the root of the Greek word tekton, the Proto Indo-European stem “teks,” means “to weave,” and it surfaces in the words textile, technology, and text. 

Thus, our world—from global positioning satellite navigational systems to ridesharing apps to continents to the words you are reading on this page—appears as a world woven and, I should add, unwoven. Perhaps the world is less durably hard than the word “builder” suggests and more like soft tissue, like flesh. 

Today, under the spell of this etymological enchantment, the mountains surrounding me as I drive in the Connecticut River Valley begin to swell gently, billow like sheets, crest and then slowly collapse and break like ocean waves. All is the endless coming together of warp and weft in unfolding new possibilities. All is fluid. All is becoming. All is change. 

This can comfort or terrorize me, of course, depending on my situation and the disposition I adopt. In the first weeks of the seismic soul-shaking that followed my learning of the sexual harassment complaint filed against me, when an administrator told me he guessed there was a 90% chance I’d be fired, I was terrified, and I bucked hard against the riptide of change. I armed and armored myself, misunderstanding myself, the situation, and indeed, the nature of all things.

But it is exactly the nature of change to elude all such stiffening efforts. And the only thing more painful than change, it suddenly dawned on me, is resisting inevitable change. And so a point came when I begged for release, not from change, but from my self, or whatever the thing is within myself that hardens against the flow, my ego I suppose. I begged for release into change, to surrender and become one with the flow. I broke and flowed, an embryo, a yolk. 

I became, in a sense, who, as a Cancer, I already was: a child of the moon, the moon whose face, receiving and responding to the sun’s fixed light, thus changes constantly. But the moon also animates the ebbs and flows of the sloshing liquid world of which we are but splashes or less: mere droplets, destined to be joined—as I yearned for at that moment—to the aqueous whole. And in this aspect, as in its misty shifting light and even—why not?—in its dark, shadow side, the moon becomes the protective womb engendering all manner of creation, which is to say of transition and transformation, metamorphosis and mutation. 

The moon is rock like the mountain to whose breast I clung on that howling windy night. Like the mountain, the moon is Earth, spun off from our young planet in the maelstrom of cosmic impacts four billion years ago. And yet, like the mountain, once I had yielded to it, the rocky, barren moon revealed itself to be soft and protective once I surrendered to the weaving flows over which it presides. Ever diminishing, ever renewing, the moon provided me tangible comfort and took its place as a guiding light in an orienting mandala, taking shape within my soul at that time. 

Indeed, that is what was occurring, slowly and mostly unconsciously: my psyche was assembling for itself a map, a kind of spiritual navigational device to orient my changing self in my changed world, to orient myself in a world that was changed perhaps most of all in that I suddenly become acutely and viscerally sensitive to its ever-changing quality.

I have spoken before of the ocean and the rising and setting sun, and now of the mountain and the moon. Placed like the points of a diamond in my mandala, I see them now as loose equivalents for the four ancient elements—water, fire, earth, and air—comprising in their endless, kaleidoscopic combination all that is. Set thus as cardinal points in this cosmic compass, they remind me of the fundamental nature of the universe and that I am not so much in as of that universe, comprised of the same endlessly shifting stuff.

Of course, my days navigating change were not spent constantly contemplating universal harmonies, far from it. I ate, slept, cried, agonized, laughed, numbed out, watched TV, listened to music, felt sorry for myself, went camping, talked to people, took walks, got drunk, read, went for runs, wrote, meditated. Slowly, trial and error sifted these varied experiments into a few daily activities that consistently sustained me: conversation, music, meditation, reading, writing, and nature. 

Reflecting now, I imagine these activities resolving into constituent elements: friendship and solitude, culture and nature, motion and rest, sound and silence. I visualize these four pairs as the cardinal points of two new diamonds. From these, I can generate any healing activity. I place these two, each offset by 60 degrees, over the first diamond.

         Ah! And now I see!

         These are the lights by which my psyche oriented itself—still to this day, every day—in a fluid world of sometimes terrifying change. Mountain to moon to mandala: this last a symbol of the universal whole and map of my place in it; tapestry woven from all the threads of my existence—ignorance, craving, shame, terror, anger, sadness, vulnerability, innocence, wonder, connection, joy—into a sacred geometry.

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