The Still Point

Layla sat beside Zahir on the ancient stone, its surface worn smooth by time and weather, as if the earth itself had been waiting for this moment. The valley below shimmered in the late light, and the wind carried the scent of cedar and memory.

Zahir placed a pebble between them. “Do you feel it?” he asked.

Layla looked inward. She felt the pulse of the earth beneath her, the slow turning of the planet, the breath of the cosmos moving through her lungs. She felt the ache of longing, not for something, but from something. A longing that had no object, only direction.

“The wind?” she asked.

Zahir smiled. “The stillness.”

Layla closed her eyes. Inside, she saw motion, thoughts like birds, desires like rivers, memories like stars. But beneath them, something else. A vastness. A stillness that was not empty, but full. Not absence, but presence.

She remembered a phrase she had once heard: “A circle without circumference, whose center is everywhere.” She had not understood it then. Now, sitting on a rock spinning through space, she did.

Stillness was not the opposite of motion. It was the heart of it. The unmoved mover. The center that does not hold, because it does not need to.

She opened her eyes and gazed at the pebble between them, its smallness suddenly vast. She felt as though she were looking into a star, or perhaps into herself.

“Zahir,” she said softly, “how can the center be everywhere? Doesn’t a center need a boundary to define it?”

Zahir looked at her, eyes reflecting the sky. “Only in the world of form. In the world of essence, the center is not a point, it is presence. It is not located but revealed.”

Layla touched her chest. “Then this… this ache I feel, is it the center calling?”

Zahir nodded. “It is the echo of unity. The ache is not separation, it is remembrance. You ache because you are not apart, but you have forgotten.”

She closed her eyes again. The wind moved through her hair like a whisper. She felt the earth turning, the stars singing in silence, the breath of all things moving through her own.

“I feel like I am dissolving,” she said. “Not vanishing but becoming… everything.”

Zahir smiled. “That is the truth. The same breath that moves the galaxies moves through you.”

Layla opened her eyes. The valley was still there, but now it shimmered, not with light, but with meaning. She looked at Zahir, and for a moment, she saw not a teacher, but reflection of herself.

“Then there is no separation,” she whispered.

“None,” Zahir replied. “Only the illusion of edges. The circle has no circumference, because it was never drawn. It was always here.”

As the wind moved through the valley, Layla felt something within her begin to dissolve, not into nothingness, but into everything. The boundaries she had clung to, her name, her story, her sorrow softened like mist in morning light.

She turned to Zahir, but he was no longer just a man beside her. He was the mountain, the wind, the silence. And she, too, was no longer just Layla. She was the breath between words, the stillness beneath motion, the center that had no place and yet was everywhere.

“I don’t know who I am,” she whispered.

Zahir’s voice was gentle. “You are not who you think. You are what remains when thinking falls away.”

She felt no fear in the unknowing. Only spaciousness. A vast, luminous presence that did not need a name.

The ache she had carried for so long, her longing for home, for meaning, for rest, was not gone. But it had changed. It was no longer a wound. It was a doorway.

She saw the valley not as something outside her, but as something within. The trees breathed with her. The sky mirrored her silence. The stars, though distant, pulsed with the same rhythm as her heart.

“I am the circle,” she said. “Not drawn but known.”

Zahir nodded. “And the center is not a place. It is the knowing itself.”

Layla closed her eyes. She did not vanish. She did not ascend. She simply sat on a rock spinning through space, in a body made of stars, in a silence that sang.

Layla breathed in, no longer as a seeker, but as the sought…

Hi silvery blue (such a great handle)

I very much relate to the sorrow of seeing someone like Layla, a sparrow in a silo, and the longing to help, and knowing you can’t.

I’ve come to see Layla not just as a person, but as an anima figure in the Jungian sense. She represents the descent, the inner journey, the confrontation with darkness that we must face alone. She also represents the return from such a descent.

I see ‘Layla’s Descent’ as a mirror of the Dark Night of the Soul, a spiritual and psychological passage where light disappears, and one must walk through shadow to find transformation. I don’t view it as a punishment, but a passage. And while it’s painful to witness, I’ve come to believe that these descents are deeply personal that can’t be bypassed, or rescued from, without risking the integrity of the transformation.

I’m reminded of the story of the butterfly: someone sees it struggling to emerge from its cocoon and, wanting to help, gently opens it. But the butterfly, having skipped the struggle, lacks the strength to fly. The effort was necessary. The pain a part of the becoming.

So, when I see Layla, or anyone in that descent, I feel the ache, but I also try to hold space to be present. To trust that the descent is not the end, but the beginning. That the soil of suffering may yet yield something beautiful, silvery blue. And maybe, just maybe, the presence of a butterfly above the silo is enough, not to lift the sparrow, but to remind her that flight is possible.

I’m working on a Layla story to show that in her way she learns how to fly.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to share the story of ‘Layla’s Descent’ as it came not from theory or belief, but from experience.

Layla’s descent does not promise healing, clarity, or light. It offers no steps, no guarantees. It is not a path to follow, but perhaps a rhythm to feel… if and when it comes. Some may read this and feel nothing. Some may descend and find only silence. That possibility breaks my heart because I know what it is to wait in the dark and not be met.

A part of me wonders if it might be seen as wishful thinking, magical language dressed in metaphor. But I also know this: truth and myth often walk together. And sometimes, what seems like wishful thinking is simply a language for what cannot be said any other way.

So, I offer this story as a lantern. It may not light your way. But perhaps, in a quiet moment, it will remind you that someone else has walked through the dark, and found something waiting not to fix them, but to meet them, and that as only a beginning.

Layla’s Descent

Before Layla began seeking, she trusted life deeply, but her trust was not rooted in herself. It was founded on others. Others who perhaps intentionally but more often unintentionally left a wound not easily named. At the time, she didn’t understand it as betrayal born of the pain not her own. Instead, she assumed the fault was hers: a quiet, lingering shame that she was not enough.

It wasn’t just the hurt that lingered, but the way it unraveled her sense of safety, her ability to believe in the goodness of closeness.

Her family and community had offered teachings: Forgive quickly. Trust again, have Faith. Pain is a lesson… But these words, though well-meaning, felt like stones pressed into her hands when she needed balm.

In those early years, Layla felt like a sparrow trapped in a silo, fluttering toward every crack that let in light, only to find the light too narrow to escape through.

Layla did not choose the descent. It chose her.

The betrayal had shattered something fundamental, not just her trust, but her sense of belonging. The teachings she had inherited from her family and community, once warm and guiding, now felt like distant stars, beautiful, but unreachable.

Still, she tried to hold onto them. She repeated their phrases like prayers. But they no longer fit. They were garments sewn for someone else.

And so, she fell. Not gracefully. Not willingly. But at least honestly.

The silo was not a metaphor then; it was her world. A place of cold walls and dim light. She was the sparrow, fluttering toward every crack, every sliver of brightness. But the light was cruel in its insufficiency. It showed her what might be but never offered a way through.

In time, she began to resent the light. It felt like mockery.

And that was when the descent truly began.

She stopped seeking escape. She let herself feel the despair not as failure, but as reality. She sat in the silence, in the ache, in the rawness of being alone. She did not try to rise. She did not try to heal.

She simply stayed.

What felt like years passed but who can measure such things when falling in the dark…

Yet in that staying, something shifted. The silo did not break open. It dissolved.

Not all at once, but slowly as she began to see that its walls were made of language and measurements, labels inherited but never claimed. Expectations. Roles. Definitions of strength and goodness that had never been hers.

She did not rise from the silo. She walked out of it, not by climbing upward, but inward.

There, in the soil of her own heart, she found a rhythm. Not of light only, but of light and her own dark beauty.

And that was the day she came upon Zahir, whom she watched from a distance…

The story above began long ago in silence, in sorrow, in the slow unraveling of what was once trusted and failed to bring connection. And yet, I know this story is not mine alone. I see Layla’s descent, her silence, her rhythm echo in others, often quietly, often unseen.

Most of us I suspect, at some point, for some reason, find ourselves in the silo, clinging to scraps of light, hoping they will be enough. That they might make us enough… We flutter toward cracks, mistaking glimpses for freedom. We inherit teachings, wear them like garments, and wonder why they don’t fit.

Many remain in the silo, not out of weakness, but because the scraps of light are all they’ve known. This truth breaks my heart, not in judgment, but in recognition. From that heartbreak, compassion arises, the only “word” that fits. Sometimes, it comes like a hush from within, so deep it feels like prayer, perhaps what prayer is meant to be…

The descent unfortunately cannot be taught. It can only be lived as it begins not with answers, but with ache. Layla learned to walk inward, and in doing so, she found something not given but grown, a foundation of trust and resilience within…

So, if Layla story finds you at a time of descent, may she accompany you as a friend… of dark beauty.

I think its wise, as you say silvery blue, to be discerning with whom we share our stories. And I like the rhythm expressed in letting stories go and lettings some linger… a movement from definition to unfolding presence

There’s a Buddhist teaching known as the Parable of the Two Arrows. The first arrow is life: pain, loss, disappointment. It strikes without warning. The second arrow is the one we fire ourselves: the rumination, the retelling, the self-blame. The suffering we create in response to the pain. The stories when shared to freely, I think, to easily becomes a second arrow, not because it’s false, but of our tendency toe hold such things too tightly and letting it define us too narrowly.

I’m finding I’m not a fan of the word ‘define’. The word “define” seems so small, yet it carries the weight of containment. To define is to say “this is what it is, and nothing more.” And when applied to the self, it can become a kind of trap, especially when stories, roles, or past experiences are mistaken for the whole of who we are.

It’s no surprise to me that wisdom traditions spend so much effort, or non-effort, 😊 untying the knots that definition creates. They don’t reject the story, but they refuse to let it become a cage. In Advaita Vedanta, the phrase “Tat Tvam Asi” – “Thou art That” – is a direct challenge to the idea that the self can be defined like a word. The words at first glance might appeared to define however these words don’t try to erase the knot but embraces it, and by embracing it dissolves it.

“I am That” is not a definition; it’s a recognition that the deepest truth of the self is not a fixed identity, but the infinite, the un-nameable, the whole. And we are that!

If I say, “I am defined by my story,” I am speaking from the ego’s need for clarity. Oh how I love clarity ☹ But if we begin to ask, “What if I am That which holds the story?” we step into the space of the Self. The story still matters, but it no longer confines. It becomes a thread in a much larger tapestry.

I liked how Fredrik Backman handled the subject in his book ‘My Friends’ The story revolves around telling a young woman the story behind a painting of friends of a long-ago summer. Tears were shed but so was laughter. The story didn’t constrict or define though it could have. Instead, the characters allowed for the creating of space for the young woman Louisa to enter. Allowing the story to continue in its unfolding in her. In the story Louisa keeps looking for the happy ending only to discover she is the happy ending.

I feel that matches the Sufi wisdom where the self is seen as a mirror reflecting divine qualities. To define oneself too rigidly is to obscure the mirror. The path is not to hold onto stories, but to let them dissolve into presence.

Hi Alessa
No need to apologize the idea behind stories was to let people see what they will in them so me saying I ‘missed the mark’ kind of undermined that. Of course I didn’t notice till I clicked post, I assume because the ‘universe’ thinks that funny. I wish they brought back the window to edit. Still all good.

I think, from my own experience and observations, that its near imposable not to project our fears and hopes into virtual world conversations where the only tool we have is language. As you note if such is the case, trust is important if not the key.

I hated book reports even though, or maybe because, I really struggled saying what I wanted to say. Primary because I can’t spell to save my life, which meant I limited myself to the words I would use, and even then, would lose all the points for grammar and spelling so I would always only just pass. Of course I took that a meaning I was stupid because that’s what we do when where young and don’t know better.

Today we have all these wonderful tool but even then one has to be careful. Ai will tell you what you want to hear. I use it to check my grammar and flow and then argue with it when it starts changing what I’m trying to saying and you can learn quite a bit doing that.

You wont be surprised to learn that I have filled notebooks with quotes from books I read, then spend years linking ideas from different sources. Now I can revisit those thoughts, test the connections, and really explore them. But I still need to be careful using these tools.

Thank you, Alessa. I appreciate your honesty and the clarity.

I agree, sometimes people are simply different, and understanding each other can be incredibly difficult.

It seems my story and metaphor of mirrors may have missed the mark, especially since our conclusions are much the same. That’s okay, this method of expressing things is something I’m experimenting with, and I’m grateful for your feedback.

The idea I was exploring is that in every interaction, we are both a reflection and a mirror. It’s part of why understanding is so elusive. We don’t just see the other, we also shape what we see, and are shaped in return. This I feel is even more true in the virtual world we attempt to connect through. The task, as Rumi points to, is to recognize this dynamic and then gently let go of the mirror.

As you more clearly said: avoid judging, avoid labeling, and learn to find the beauty of knowing oneself.

Sometimes the mirror distorts. Sometimes it clarifies, thanks for your clarification. As you point to the invitation is to step beyond reflection altogether, and meet each other not as images, but as presence.

“And in the stillness where no mirror remains, I learn to meet the world not as a reflection, but as a breath passing through, unseen, yet wholly here.“