The Mountains Never Left

Sometimes the truth isn’t absent. It’s simply hidden from view.

There was a morning in Vermont when I stepped outside with a cup of coffee before anyone else was awake. A thick blanket of fog covered the lake. Beyond it were mountains I had admired every day of the trip. That morning they had vanished completely. The world seemed smaller somehow—as though the lake simply ended in white. Yet I wasn’t concerned. I knew the mountains were there. I had seen them the evening before.

As I stood quietly watching, the first warmth of the rising sun began to touch the fog. Almost imperceptibly, the white veil started to thin. First the outline of a distant tree appeared. Then a shoreline. Then, almost as if they had been painted back into existence, the mountains slowly emerged. They had never gone anywhere. Only the fog had hidden them.

Meditation has often felt the same to me. There are seasons when clarity seems effortless. Life makes sense. Peace feels close. Then there are other times when worry, grief, uncertainty, or endless thinking settle over the mind like morning fog. We begin to believe the peace has disappeared. We search for it. We try to create it again. But perhaps peace is more like those mountains. It doesn’t come and go. Only our ability to see it does.

The Yoga Sutras suggest that awareness itself never becomes clouded. Thoughts may appear. Emotions may pass through. Memories rise and fade. But the awareness in which they appear remains untouched, just as the mountains remained exactly where they had always been. We don’t create clarity. We wait patiently for the fog to lift.

Sometimes meditation feels less like finding something new and more like allowing the sun to do its quiet work. Nothing is forced. Nothing is manufactured. The warmth of simple attention slowly dissolves what was never permanent to begin with.

The mountains reveal themselves because they never stopped being there. Perhaps the peace you seek has been waiting just as patiently.

“The mountains never disappeared. Only the fog concealed them.”