Prayer flags fluttered in the breeze, from wooden roof to rock cairn to mountainous ridge. Stretched taut, they sung; carrying their message on the wind. He stood atop the stone walls of the monastery, surveying the valley below—once a path for a glacier, the valley had been hewn from the monotonous motion of the river of ice.
Despite never having left the confines of the valley’s metamorphic crenellations, he felt he had no need to. With the sharpness of a yanyuedao and the serenity of a reclining moon, he stepped through life one step at a time—his waraji straw sandals anchored in the past, present, and future, all at once. Experience only exists in the now; lamentations of the past and anxieties of the future are mere experiences of the present.
Inhale—past, present, future.
Exhale—past, present, future.
Breath, like the prayer flags, carries its message on the breeze too. Awareness born upon the exhale, sentience sent to the far corners of the horizon.
Careening down from the mountaintops, the frigid air cut into his exposed skin as daggers. His long hair, unkempt and uncouth, was caught by the breath of the mountains too. Everything seemed to breath, to heave in existence, a universal inhale in acknowledgement of awareness.
