Hi Alessa
I have a tendency to confuse so am curious to know what your thoughts on change are and why you think we may have different notions around it?

I very much like the idea of “Holding things lightly, even holding lightly the idea of holding things lightly” 🙂 and the bottle that is empty yet never empty. I also like the notion that everything, even our anger and hate can be a door to something beautiful and how that can soften the ‘voice of the narrator”.

Thanks Everyone

Hi Alissa. My thought was that every thought spoken and unspoken creates story and that we can’t avoid our narrator. Still we landed in the same space 🙂 with the suggestion that its not so much a matter of avoiding the narrator or choosing or being free of stories but of holding our words lightly.

I’m reminded of a recent visit home were I was engaged in a theology debate and found myself unbalanced. It was only on the drive home that I realized my in-law kept going to the dictionary to define the words I was trying to get him to look past them. In hindsight I wish I would have asked him how he avoid the temptation of mistaking the law for love, discipline for devotions, righteousness for relationship, or map for the territory.

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Layla’s silence
Zahir: You’ve grown quiet, Layla. Is there nothing left to say?

Layla: There is nothing that words can hold. I descended seeking answers, but the soil does not speak in sentences.

Zahir: And yet you are here. You are listening.

Layla: Listening, yes. But not to meaning. Only to the space between meanings, the hush where questions dissolve.

Zahir: Do you still wonder who you are?

Layla: I did. But each name I carried fell away like leaves. Without language, there is no self to describe, no story to uphold.

Zahir: Then what remains?

Layla: Not silence. Not presence. Only the absence of scaffolding. A stillness that neither confirms nor denies…

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.