Through It All, the Mountains and Trees Still Sit.

Once on horseback and another time on foot, I’ve been fortunate to experience the wonder and wisdom of Cocora Valley in Salento, Colombia. It’s become my place of refuge this month, a place where I’ve been able to both calmly reflect and seek advice and perspective during these difficult times.

“By becoming the mountain in our meditation practice, we can link up with its strength and stability and adopt them for our own. We can use its energies to support our energy to encounter each moment with mindfulness, equanimity, and clarity. It may help us to see that our thoughts and feelings, our preoccupations, our emotional storms and crises, even the things that happen to us are very much like the weather on the mountain. We tend to take it all personally, but its strongest characteristic is impersonal. Thus, the weather of our own lives is not to be ignored or denied– it is to be encountered, honored, felt, known for what it is, and held in awareness. And in holding it in this way, we come to know a deeper silence, stillness, and wisdom.”

Yes, at times visited by violent storms, high winds, and heavy rains– but through it all, the mountains and trees still sit, stronger than ever.