Climbing the Lighthouse

Climbing the Lighthouse

How breath, sketching, and awareness reveal an ever-widening view of ourselves and the world.

For a long time I thought meditation was about paying attention to the breath. Lately I’ve begun to see it differently. The breath is not so much the object of meditation as it is the background of every experience. It is always there, whether I notice it or not.

The mind wanders because that is what minds do. It drifts into memories, plans, judgments, fears, and fantasies. Sometimes it becomes so absorbed in its own creations that it forgets where it is. Yet it is never truly lost. The breath is like the string of a kite. The kite may soar far into the sky, tossed by changing winds, but the string remains connected. The practice is not learning how to keep the kite perfectly still. The practice is remembering that the string has never left your hand.

That image has slowly changed the way I understand awareness.

The journey no longer feels like moving from one place to another. It feels more like climbing the spiral staircase inside a lighthouse. With every turn I pass the same direction, but my view becomes a little wider. Nothing outside has changed. The fields, the shoreline, the horizon are all the same. What changes is the height from which I see them.

The same thing seems to happen inwardly.

I begin by noticing my thoughts. At first they appear to be the whole of my experience. Then I notice that every thought is surrounded by a feeling. If I remain with the feeling instead of chasing the thought, something opens. Feeling itself begins to rest inside a quieter knowing. That knowing is less interested in solving life than in seeing it clearly. From that clarity, action becomes simpler. Doing is no longer driven by habit or reaction. It becomes an expression of understanding.

Nothing has been left behind.

Thinking has not disappeared. It has simply been absorbed into something larger. Feeling includes thinking. Knowing includes feeling. Doing includes them all.

Nature seems to work this way everywhere. A raindrop does not stop being water when it joins a stream. The stream does not disappear when it becomes a river, and the river loses nothing when it enters the ocean. Each form is held within a larger one. Nothing is rejected. Everything is included.

Perhaps awareness unfolds in the same way.

This has changed the way I think about sketching.

I used to believe that sketching was a way of recording what I saw. Increasingly, I experience it as a way of discovering how I am seeing. A simple sketch makes contact with the present moment. From that contact, connections begin to appear. Those connections awaken feelings that had been unnoticed. As those feelings become clearer, they gradually settle into a larger sense of wholeness.

It feels less like making a drawing and more like digesting an experience.

A meal nourishes us only after it has been digested. In the same way, experience becomes wisdom only after it has been taken in, explored, and allowed to become part of us. Sketching slows that process enough for it to happen consciously.

One sentence has stayed with me for years. It comes from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, and it inspired this reflection:

“Know the world as your own creation and be free.”

As I imagine climbing the lighthouse, those words are written on the wall of the spiral staircase. I encounter them again and again with every revolution.

The words never change, yet they are never the same. Each time I read them, I am standing a little higher. The landscape below has widened. What seemed fixed begins to reveal itself as something my own mind has been shaping through memory, expectation, fear, hope, and habit.

Freedom is not creating a different world.

Freedom is seeing how the world I experience is continually being created.

The breath quietly witnesses it all.

Whenever I become caught in thought, lost in emotion, or carried away by the stories my mind invents, I don’t need to fight my way back. I simply notice the string.

The breath is still there.

It always has been.

And with that simple return, I discover that I was never as far away as I imagined.