The Prophet Becomes the Hill

It was almost dawn.

The moon came over the hill first, extraordinarily bright. Venus followed below and slightly to its left. They were almost all I could see in the sky.

Then, around forty minutes later, the sun began to rise behind them.

Moon, Venus, sun—in procession. All passing over the same hill, following the same arc into the morning.

I sat there watching.

Something about it felt strange. Not wrong exactly, but as though I were seeing the movement of the sky from a different position. A position I had not occupied before.

Then fog began rising in the north. We seldom have fog here, but that morning it appeared as the sun was arriving from the other direction.

And suddenly, the landscape became the architecture of what I was experiencing.

The past was disappearing into mist. Not erased. Not denied. Veiled.

It was still there, but it was no longer the operative reality. The fog seemed to be laying a gentle cover over everything already travelled.

Ahead, the sun was rising.

The future was not waiting somewhere in the distance. It was already arriving, lighting what had not yet been visible.

And directly in front of me was the apex of the hill.

The axis.

I was sitting at the threshold between what had been and what was coming—and, from that position, I could see both at once.

The future becoming the past

I have often thought of transition as movement.

We leave one place and travel towards another. We move from an old life into a new one. We cross the threshold and continue forward.

But that morning, I was not moving.

I was sitting completely still.

The night faded. The fog rose. The sun arrived. The entire landscape changed around me, but I remained exactly where I was.

And I realised:

I do not have to move through the transition.
The transition is moving through me.

The future was arriving, passing through the present, and becoming the past.

I could stand at the axis and watch it unfold.

There was nothing I needed to control. Nothing I needed to accelerate. Nothing I needed to force into form.

Even my mind, which usually wants to understand the architecture of everything, became strangely quiet.

It made one or two increasingly faint attempts:

But… we have to figure this out.

And then even that began to fade.

I could simply witness the movement without needing to manage it.

When everyone wants something

Then, because life rarely allows a recognition to remain beautifully abstract for long, a very practical question appeared:

Can I do the same thing when everyone wants something from me?

Can I remain at the axis when requests, needs, expectations and problems arrive from every direction?

My familiar movement has often been to leave my own centre and go towards whatever needs attention. To become what the moment, the person or the problem appears to require.

But the hill was not going anywhere.

It was not running towards the moon. It was not pulling the sun over the horizon. It was not trying to disperse the fog.

It simply remained.

And because it remained, I could orient myself around it.

Perhaps this is what I am being asked to understand now.

I do not need to go towards everyone.

I do not have to become what they need.

I can remain where I am and let people sit with me.

That is not withdrawal. It is not distance or refusal.

It is presence without abandonment of my own axis.

The hill did not do anything for me that morning. It did not offer an explanation or tell me what would happen next.

It simply was.

And in relationship with that stillness, I could see something I had not been able to see before.

The inversion

Then I remembered the familiar saying:

If the prophet does not go to the mountain, the mountain comes to the prophet.

But that was not what had happened either.

I had not gone to the mountain.

The mountain had not come to me.

The separation itself had changed.

I was no longer looking towards the axis as though it existed somewhere outside me. I was no longer waiting for the landscape to deliver an answer.

For that moment, I occupied the same function as the hill.

Still, while everything moved.

Present, while past and future changed places.

Not controlling the field, but allowing its movement to become visible.

And the proverb inverted again:

The prophet becomes the hill.

There is something wonderfully funny in that.

The mind spends years trying to understand the mountain, reach the mountain, interpret the mountain or persuade the mountain to come closer.

Then one morning, it discovers that none of this was required.

Stay where you are.

Let the world move.

The witness at the threshold

I do not know whether the sky was showing me something or whether I had finally become able to see in the landscape what was already becoming visible within me.

I do know that the distinction matters.

After I shared the experience with Howard North, his response helped me hold it more clearly. The Earth had not reversed its spin. The moon and Venus were rising ahead of the sun. The sky was not the cause, but it could still become a mirror.

That grounding did not diminish the experience. It helped me see what I was walking through without turning its meaning into a claim about the mechanics of the world.

Thank you, Howard, for meeting the strangeness without dismissing it—and for helping me keep both the sky and the meaning intact.

The moon was real.

Venus was real.

The sun followed them over the hill.

The fog rose.

The night faded.

And I was there to witness it.

What became clear was not a prediction about what comes next. It was a different way of standing in relationship with it.

I do not have to chase the future.

I do not have to preserve the past.

I do not have to push the transition forward or decide what form it must take.

I can remain at the threshold long enough for the next landscape to reveal itself.

The past can recede without being rejected.

The future can arrive without being controlled.

And I can remain whole while both are visible.

At the exact culmination of this recognition, the sun came over the hill.

And then my dogs barked—presumably to make sure the stillness was not getting too much of the stage.

They have excellent timing.

So I stayed where I was.

The future moved into the past through the present.

The sun continued rising.

The dogs continued being dogs.

The axis held.

And the world turned.