Deep in the mountains the road I’m lost on

by Ron C. Moss

I stumbled across the work of Ron C. Moss, a visual artist and poet from Tasmania, Australia who practices the Japanese art form of haiga, where a visual image is combined with a haiku. He is featured on The Awakened Eye website (“a sanctuary where the oft-overlooked relationship between creative expression and the unknown/unknowable can be openly explored and celebrated”) as one of their artisans – and if you are interested in a meeting place between visual art and the ‘intimate unknowable’, there is much to discover here.

I was moved by a number of his haiku’s and images, but this one stood out in its simple but evocative seeming paradox. Lost in the deep mountains, and yet on the road, which much lead from somewhere to somewhere else. I’m familiar with that layeredness of experience: feeling quite lost on some level, while at the same time a deep trust – or maybe you could even call it faith – that this feeling of lostness is included in being on the right path.

This encouragement to trust is also in Teddy Macker’s long and multifaceted ‘Poem for my Daughter‘, where one of the verses reads:

No matter what you do, no matter what happens,
it is impossible to leave the path.

Let me say that one more time:
No matter what you do, no matter what happens,
it is impossible to leave the path.

In other words, however lost you may feel, you are still on the path… May that be an encouragement in unsure times, so that we may move through ups and downs, times of feeling lost and found, with steady equanimity.

PS Keeping in touch with trust even when feeling lost, is helped by the powerful quality of equanimity. If you’d like to explore that further, there’s a weekend workshop on just that topic coming up…

For designs by Rob C. Moss, head over to his shop here.

But that’s not real, my mind demands,
trusting the seedless machine.
My mind repeats the newscaster’s
teleprompted panic. Repeats
the doctor’s doomsday speech.
There’s no time to not be real, it begs.

I point to my left lung–a satchel full
of tumors. Point to a pantry full of pills
that haven’t helped, a bed I have
hardly left for weeks.

Is this what you mean by real? I ask.

Yes! my mind screams, frantic
in its mission to make matter
all that matters.

But how
is that more real, I say,
than the first time I was breathless
from holding a stethoscope to my pain
and hearing the heartbeat of the whole world?

My mind argues like a seasoned lawyer,
all objection and rebuttals.
But I, an artist, stretch my heart out
into canvas, hand one brush
to joy and another brush to grief,
grinning as I watch them paint
the exact same rolling meadow
the same hue of emerald green.

That isn’t real, my mind insists
as I take off running through
the pasture, stopping only to do
a cartwheel beside a lonely windmill
who has always wanted a friend.

I fly up the solemn staircase
of a billionaire’s lifeless mansion
to replace the diamonds with raindrops
I found huddled on a leaf of a Birch
tree beside my home when
I was nine and a half years old.

It’s not real that you still have those!
my mind protests, as if everything
that ever was isn’t forever here.
As if I’m not still a giggling child
hiding in the place I know my mom will
look first, because I want to be found.

During my CT scan last week
I couldn’t find myself inside of myself
because my mind was louder than I was.
But then I gave up all control, unfurled
like the petals of a pen blooming
poems on the sterile walls,
for the next worried patient to water.

But that’s not real, my mind contends.
Real is provable. Googleable.

Then google this, I say, —

The chemo that kept me alive,
the chemo cold men in white coats
take credit for, is sourced from the bark
of the Pacific Yew tree and was first
discovered for its healing properties
by Two-Spirit Indigenous people
in the Pacific Northwest, who were guided
by the voices of moss and the mist.

Is that real? my mind asks.

I don’t see the point in answering
because my mind can’t hear the language
spoken by the moss, has never
picked the sweetest fruit from the saddest note
of a song and planted every seed
to feed the joy of those to come.

What’s the worst thing that ever happened
to you? my mind asked me long ago.

I said, Not believing in what I couldn’t yet see.

What’s the best thing that ever happened
to you? my mind asked me long ago.

I said, Learning that you are not me.

by Andrea Gibson

Sometimes words feel like an imposition, or a foregone failure. This poem (introduced here by the poet) gives me that feeling. How do I follow it? When I finish reading, I know I’ve received something essential, something precious. It feels like a blessing — one bestowed on my small, human self, which is just a fragment of all humanity. It lifts me into a glowing mixture of beauty and sorrow, swelling into what feels like heart-rending love. Thank you, Andrea Gibson.

Andrea Gibson died last week. That’s how I came across this poem at all. With their passing, their poetry, writing, and life stories have spread further and more swiftly, crossing boundaries and reaching me — and many others. They seem to have written from a place of desperate, beautiful truth-telling, from the insight of someone who knows how fully swept up in impermanence they really are. No space for denial, complacency, distraction, or anything inessential.

The poem also speaks, for me, as a teaching about the mind. One that Andrea seems to have felt compelled to speak urgently before they departed this earth. This is captured with striking clarity in the last lines, but also explored through the drama of their internal dialogue, making it deeply relatable. The lesson? That imagination is an extraordinary resource of wisdom — one we neglect and sideline to our peril. We need to bring it back. Let it speak. It may just save you, though probably not in the way you expect.

Finally, the poem also deepens this lesson by showing how materialistic thinking and behaviour pull us away from both our inner wisdom and the abundance of the wondrous world around us. Which are more precious, raindrops or diamonds?

Ps. Join me for the next Mindfulness Meets Mystical Poetry course beginning 30^th October 2025, to be introduced to a wide variety of poetry from many cultures and eras, that teaches us how to be deeply present and takes us beyond our small minds…

Photo by Pedro Netto on Unsplash

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery,
but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

by Diane Ackerman, “found poetry” from A Natural History of the Senses

What enables being alive to feel like a love affair with life? Some moments, some days can feel like that to me, but I’ve also lived moments where it’s felt more like I imagine a prison sentence might feel like, and many days where it’s something in between. So how to live more like the poet, writer and naturalist Diane Ackerman is inviting us to do?

Living as ‘variously’ as possible, evokes a sense of embracing things beyond my known comfortzone, seeking out adventures and opening up to different perspectives. And combining that with ‘grooming one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred’, it gives rise to an flavour of living life fully awake, like other poets I’ve enjoyed invite us to do. I’m thinking of  Toyohiko Kagawa when he prays to never find himself ‘yawning at life’, and Mary Oliver when she says she wants to live her life like a ‘bride to amazement’, or when Derek Wallcot urges us to ‘feast on your life’… and there are many more. And also Jim Carrey’s movie Yes Man comes to mind, where his withdrawn character tries out saying yes to everything (although he discovers that some discernment is important alongside that spirit of up-for-it-ness!).

An awareness of the nearness of death can do it too, the knowing that we have a limited time on this bright planet and with the precious people around us…

So it’s a practice! Something to remind myself of in my intentions for the day. Mindfulness and curiosity go hand in hand, so continuing to grow in mindfulness also encourages to explore the ‘savage and beautiful country’ of this life!

PS … and adventuring together is always more fun! There’s a new level 1 Mindfulness course about to start, and there’s also the Living Well to Die Well course which can inspire living to the full…

Photo by Margarida Afonso on Unsplash