the_cathedral_within ovenbird “It is our habit, when asked to imagine a mountain, to think only of its exterior, its peaks and crags, its wooded slopes and tumbling waterfalls, the creatures that inhabit it, the circling birds and chattering squirrels, the climbers scaling its turrets with their picks and ropes. But this is only a small part of a mountain, the thinnest of veneers. What of the cathedral within it? What of the molten channels snaking through our volcanoes, the granite slabs that compose our cordilleras, the deeper folds of schist and gneiss, the strata and unconformities, the slate and sandstone? Because a mountain is also this. Or might I say: a mountain is MOSTLY this. For every terrestrial stream, there run a thousand below the earth. For each pond, a hundred inner seas. And water falls, and airy marbled chambers painted with every color of the atmospheric rainbow, and more. That is a mountain. The one we see is but a fleeting apparition. It is as if I were to ask you, "What makes a man?" and you think only of his skin.” (From the Introduction of Country People by Daniel Mason) What of the cathedral within… This stopped me in my tracks. Such a beautiful question and one that deeply aligns with my experience of the world. As a species we are forgetting our inner cathedrals. So many go about their days only touching the surface of things. AI is a surface technology. It skims what it can from humanity and presents it as wisdom, but it cannot provide access to the stream that runs below everything, the soul of things. Social media only provides “the thinnest of veneers.” It isn’t real. It is a dishonest curation of what it is to be human. I have long believed that inner landscapes are just as worthy of exploration as anything that can be found in the concrete world. And I think mid-life is a tool of exactly that kind of exploration. In mid-life the surface thins. This is a literal thing. Skin loses its elasticity, everything begins to fall away, youth is sloughed off and something else takes its place, something that is not beauty but a freedom from beauty, something that confers a power of invisibility, a transparency that allows you to slip into hidden places and inhabit them. My deepest inclination is to explore inner cathedrals, to know what it is to be ensouled, and to share that experience with others who are equally inclined to make inner journeys. I want to know what holy relics live in the heart. These are the excavations that matter to me most. My life’s most lonely moments have been the ones in which I have been relegated to the hostile slopes of life’s mountain, buffeted by violent winds, unable to find an entry point into the pulsing heart of the world. I have spent my life throwing open the doors of my own inner sanctum, making it vulnerable, watching it be ignored, mocked, and defiled. Don’t we all want someone to see past our exterior? Don’t we all want someone to enter into the hush of our most hidden temple and look around in wonder? We are taught that sex is the key to this kind of communion. But I think we have it wrong. We can bring our bodies to worship at the altar of our souls only when we have already learned the ancient hymns of witness. I am not a mountain to be scaled. I do not need conquest, but curiosity. Not a mind hell bent on the summit, but one concerned with depth. As I age, my surface erodes. Every cavern within me will soon be exposed. The world is already tumbling in as the ground falls away. No one tells you how majestic it will be to crumble. 260817 what's it to you? who go blather from