This morning, a minor thought lingered in my mind—not a major concern, just a small thing that hadn’t worked the way I wanted it to. It was there when I woke up, hanging in the background. I noticed it, but instead of getting lost in it, I played with my focus. I turned my attention to my hands, to the way my feet felt against the floor, to the raw sensations in my body. For a moment, the thought faded. But it kept coming back, hovering like a notification in the corner of my awareness.
When I sat down on my meditation bench, I looked out the window at the ledge where I scatter birdseed each morning. A thin layer of frozen snow covered the surface, giving it a pale, muted glow. The birds had already gathered—a mix of small movements, feathers, and hunger. And then, standing out against the white snow and gray ledge, a red cardinal.
I moved slightly, and it flew away. I waited, watching the space where it had been, camera in hand. Ten seconds later, the cardinal returned. I took the picture. And for that brief moment, my focus was so clear, so lucid, that every other thought disappeared.
But then something unusual happened. When I sat back down, I realized that the thought from earlier was still there, but now I wasn’t inside it. I could see it—not directly, but as if it were contained in a folder, like on a computer desktop. The folder was labeled, but I didn’t open it. The thought itself remained unseen.
This was a strange and interesting shift. The thought had been separated from “me.” It was no longer entangled with my sense of self. It was stored, acknowledged, but not in control. And as I looked deeper, I wondered: What is at the foundation of these thoughts?
I traced it downward. The thought, whatever it was, was sitting inside that folder. But what was beneath the folder? What was holding it up? I kept looking. And beneath it, I found something deeper: fear.
It wasn’t just this thought, it was a pattern. A structure. Beneath so many of my concerns, anxieties, and unsettled moments, there was fear. The foundation of the ego, the root of attachment and aversion. But as I sat with it, the fear itself began to change.
In Jewish mysticism, there is a word: yirah. It means both fear and awe. The same word for two seemingly opposite experiences. As I stayed with fear, it began to expand—not as panic, but as something vast, something powerful. It became awe.
I felt myself in the presence of something immense. The sensation was like standing at the base of a mountain, so enormous that I became a tiny speck before it. At first, there was fear if the mountain collapsed? What if I am crushed beneath it? But then the fear shifted. The mountain did not threaten me; it simply was. And I, too, simply was. The fear expanded into awe, into a sense of the eternal, the vastness of existence.
And in that moment, the fear dissolved.
It was as if the entire game of duality—the tension between fear and awe—had been set in motion by something greater, something that had always been there. A game designed by God, or the infinite, or whatever name we give to that presence. And in playing the game, I had forgotten.
I saw the mind’s structure like a computer. Thoughts, like individual files, stored in folders, categorized and organized on the desktop of awareness. The screen is where we bring things into focus, where we engage with a thought directly. But beyond the desktop, beyond the folders, is the Cloud—an interconnected field of knowledge, energy, presence. As a name the Cloud is like God, like chi, like prana—the energy that runs the whole system. The Cloud, like the river, is only a name we give to something in constant motion—just as any name for God can only point toward, but never contain, the vastness beyond it.
Most of the time, we get caught inside the files, lost in the details of each individual thought. But there is always the option to step back, to see the folder instead of the file. And further still, to recognize the deeper foundation—where fear transforms into awe, where the small self meets something infinite.
And maybe that’s what happened in my meditation this morning. I didn’t just observe a lingering thought. I stepped back. I saw the folder instead of the file. I saw the Cloud as the river, not a thing, but a movement. And in that space, I saw how fear could expand into awe, how stillness could reveal something greater.
Maybe the Cloud just is. And maybe that’s all it ever needs to be.
Spiritual Gravity 