Close your eyes.
And let your body soften.
If your mind is busy tonight.
There's a good chance it's busy with you.
Not just thoughts passing through.
But thoughts about you.
Who you are.
What you've done or haven't done.
What you should be by now.
The gap between the person you thought you'd become.
And the person lying here in the dark,
Still working it out.
This kind of night has a particular weight to it.
The mind presents its case in the small hours,
When there's no one to argue back.
Here's what's worth knowing.
You are not your thoughts.
An anxious thought is not a reflection of your character.
A fearful thought is not a certainty.
It's a thought.
And you are the one noticing it.
And what you are.
The one doing the noticing.
Is considerably larger,
And more solid,
And more enduring than anything currently moving through your mind.
Tonight,
We go to a place where sky and earth become one to find that quiet space within you.
Come with me.
To Bolivia.
It's night.
Clear,
Cold,
And absolutely still.
You're standing.
And then sitting.
And then lying back.
On the Salado Uni.
The largest salt flat on Earth.
12,
000 square kilometers of white crystalline salt,
Sitting at nearly 4,
000 meters above sea level in the southwest of Bolivia.
Surrounded by volcanic peaks,
And a sky so vast and so dark and so full of stars that the word sky doesn't quite cover it.
The salt beneath you is hard and cold and faintly textured,
The surface cracked into hexagonal tiles by centuries of wet and dry seasons,
Each tile slightly raised at its edges,
The pattern stretching away from you in every direction as far as you can see,
Which tonight is very far indeed.
There is a thin film of water on the surface.
Not deep.
A centimetre.
Perhaps two.
Enough to have turned the salt flat into a mirror.
And what it's mirroring is the sky.
This is the thing about the Salar de Uyuni at night that photographs cannot prepare you for.
The way the reflection is perfect.
Not approximate.
Not distorted.
But exact.
The stars above you.
Other stars below you.
The Milky Way arches overhead and arches below in equal measure.
You are lying in the middle of it,
Between two skies,
Held between two infinities,
The Earth and the heavens indistinguishable from each other in every direction.
It is genuinely impossible to tell where you end and the sky begins.
The air at this altitude is thin and extraordinarily clean.
Cold enough to see your breath.
Small clouds forming and dissolving in front of you,
There and gone.
There and go.
The kind of cold that makes you very aware of being alive.
Of the warmth your body generates without being asked to,
Of the particular animal fact of existing.
The salt tiles beneath you are solid.
Whatever else is uncertain tonight.
And perhaps much is.
The ground is there.
Has been there for 40,
000 years,
Give or take,
Since the prehistoric lake that once covered all of this evaporated slowly into the altitude and left its minerals behind.
Something that was,
In a sense,
Lost,
And became this.
Something entirely itself.
Something that draws people from every part of the world to lie on their backs and look at the sky reflected in the ground.
There is no wind.
There is almost no sound.
Just the cold,
And the stars,
And the perfect mirror of the world.
And you held between them.
Take a breath of this high altitude air.
It's thinner than you're used to.
You feel it slightly,
The way it asks a little more of your lungs.
The way each breath feels deliberate and almost ceremonial at this height.
Let your breath come slowly.
In through the nose,
Feeling the cold of it,
The cleanness.
And out.
A small cloud forming in front of you.
Dissolving instantly into the dark.
Feel the salt beneath you.
Hard and real and cold at the edges where the water has pooled.
Your weight pressing down into something that has been here for 40,
000 years.
And will be here long after tonight.
Let your shoulders drop.
Your hands.
Let them rest open.
Palms.
Receiving rather than holding.
There's nothing to grip tonight.
Your face.
Let the cold air touch it.
Your jaw.
Soft.
The space between your eyebrows.
Release.
You are lying between two skies.
A perfume.
The stars.
Blow you.
The stars.
And in the middle warm and breathing,
And entirely real.
Volcanic peaks that ring the solar are dark shapes against the star-filled sky.
Tunupa to the north,
Its cone rising over 6,
000 meters,
Ancient and silent.
The volcanoes here are not threatening things.
They are simply old.
Older than human memory.
Older than any story told about them.
Sitting in their own patience at the edge of the white plain.
A flamingo.
Improbably.
Perfectly.
Stands at the far edge of the water.
Pink,
Even in the dark.
One leg folded.
Its head tucked into its wing.
Entirely still.
The Salar is home to three species of flamingo.
And at this hour,
They had become sculptures.
Warm-blooded.
Breathing statues.
Distributed across the mirror surface,
Each one reflected perfectly in the water beneath it.
A flamingo and its reflections.
Inseparable.
Each one making the other complete.
The Milky Way has rotated slightly since you lay down.
Imperceptibly.
But measurably.
With the whole sky moving in its slow,
Ancient arc.
The same rotation that has been happening since before there was anyone lying on any surface,
Anywhere,
Looking up.
And noticing it.
Bolivia's Altiplano.
This high plateau that contains the Salar.
Has been inhabited for thousands of years.
The Aymara people,
Whose descendants still live in the villages at the edges of this plain,
Have their own name for the Milky Way.
The river in the sky.
Not a metaphor exactly.
More a recognition.
A river of light.
Moving.
Flowing.
Carrying things from one place to another.
The sky as landscape.
The landscape as sky.
Tonight.
You're lying at the exact point where the two become one.
The flamingo hasn't moved.
The stars haven't stopped.
The cold holds everything in its clear,
Clean stillness.
The thoughts that feel most like you are often the ones worth examining most carefully.
Not because they're wrong exactly.
But because they've been given far too much authority.
Has been given center stage.
It's been allowed to speak for the whole of you.
To stand at the front and say,
This is what I am.
The contents of the mind have become confused with the self that contains them.
When the thought,
I am not enough,
Stops being a thought passing through.
And starts being the thing you call yourself.
But look at what's beneath you tonight.
The salt flat holds the sky without becoming the sky.
The mirror holds the stars without becoming the stars.
The reflection is real.
As real as the thing reflected.
But it is not the thing itself.
Your thoughts are real.
They arise from real experience,
Real history.
Real feelings.
Will not be dismissed.
But they are not you You are what's noticing them.
And the one doing the noticing.
That awareness.
That quiet presence that has been there through every thought you've ever had.
Every feeling every version of yourself you've cycled through.
That is considerably more stable.
More spacious.
And more enduring than any single thought or feeling the mind produces.
Think of it this way.
Solar has held every sky that has ever passed over it.
Every storm.
Every clear night.
Every sunrise and sunset.
Since it formed 40,
000 years ago.
It has reflected all of it,
Without being altered by any of it.
The storm passes.
The reflection passes.
The salt remains,
Cracked into its hexagons,
Slightly raised at the edges,
Solid and itself.
You have held every thought that has ever moved through you.
You have reflected fear,
And joy,
And grief,
And hope.
And wonder,
And boredom,
And love.
Sometimes all in the same week.
And you are still here.
Still the one noticing.
Still the ground beneath the reflection.
What you are is not defined by what has moved through you.
What you are is what remains when you stop mistaking the reflection for the surface.
The flamingo stands in its stillness.
The stars move in their slow arc.
The two skies hold you between them.
The cold has settled properly now.
Particular clarity of chord at altitude which makes everything precise.
The edges of the volcanic peaks against the sky or sharks.
The stars are sharp.
Even the silence has an edge to it.
To find.
Exact.
The silence of a place where there is genuinely nothing to make a sound.
Your breath continues its small clouds in the dark.
In and out.
Each one complete.
Each one released with us.
The flamingo at the far edge of the water shifts slightly.
A small adjustment.
One Mac.
To the other.
And is still again.
Its reflection shifts with it.
Perfectly.
Immediately.
As though the two are one thing.
Expressed in two directions.
Perhaps they are.
The Milky Way is fully overhead now.
The river in the sky at its highest point.
Pouring its ancient light down into the mirror of the salt flats.
So that you are lying quite literally.
Inside it.
Above.
And below.
And on every side.
The same life.
The same stars.
The same ancient river flowing.
You held between two skies.
Known before you were able to know yourself.
Loved.
Before you were able to earn it.
The ground beneath you,
Solid and certain.
The stars above you.
Ancient.
And present.
And somewhere in the space between them.
In the warmth your body generates at 4,
000 meters above the sea.
In the breath that comes and goes.
In the quiet that remains when the thoughts have run their course.
Something that has always been true about you.
Waiting to be remembered.
The stars turn in their slow arc above the white plain.
Below.
Their reflection turns with them.
The flamingo stands in the still water.
Um.
.
.
And breathing.
Its reflection perfectly itself.
The cold holds everything.
In its clear and patient stillness.
You are lying.
Between two skies.
Known.
Health.
Enough.
And the sky is turning above you.
And below you.
And all around you.
And you are helped.
In the middle of it.
And you can rest in it now.
Just this night.
Just this cold,
Clear silence.
Star-filled top.
Just this breath.
