Sit like a mountain. Sit like this.

Mount Rainier

I know a few people past their skins. Past their social selves and masks, out into where they are just mountains surrounded by clouds. Just ethics, just insights, just truths. It is like talking to the ocean, or to Indra's synaptic net. It's talking on all levels at once, mapping on all levels.

"Ethics is relationship," says Leonid Anisimov.

Interacting with mountain people -- or people in their mountain incarnation -- is the great joy of my life. It's spirituality in practice. Form dissolves into energy, and when the conversation is over, the form has also been reshaped. It is tremendously efficient, clean work.

I want a theatre of mountain people.

Perhaps now I can begin to find them, and they me.

"Sit like a mountain," said Sogyal Rinpoche, the Tibetan buddhist monk. I was at a four-day retreat with him in a white-walled hall in Sydney, Australia. The room had tall windows, high dark beams, and an incredible Renaissance mural painted all across the ceiling. "Sit like a mountain. Sit like this." And then, he vanished. There was nothing left energetically but empty robes.

When people are mountains, it's only truth. Truth seined through splashing, inadequate poetic words -- truth like theatre, truth against truth, complexities of resonating unresolvable truth. Truth as the quest for truth. Truth as the highest tautness -- or easiness -- of a human spirit.

The great truths at their heart are always paradoxical, says Jim Rapson.

Ursula LeGuin, when asked over and over what The Left Hand Of Darkness was about, kept saying, "If I could tell that, I wouldn't have had to write the book."

There is something in the purifying search, that is the lesson.

It keeps me human, and grounded, to make things. Poetry, paintings, performances, dinners, blogs. There's something grounding about food and touch and art. Without that, I, like Milarepa, would just turn green from eating too many nettles.