Not by path, but by memory

In the valley of Alazani, where mountains rise not as terrain but as testament — a script of stone written by epochs — there stands a solitary wooden house. These peaks are not mere elevations but ancient sentinels, their silence thick as honey, their slopes steep enough for the sky to press its forehead against them. The air there is dense and deliberate, like a forgotten prayer still echoing in some hollow of time.

The house rests at the edge of a hidden hollow, like a comma in an unfinished epic. And it is wrapped in mist — not a whim of weather, but its essence, an atmospheric psalm where each wisp is a syllable. The mist does not drift.

It remains.
It is like a feeling without origin.
A thought that has lost its time.
A reader who has forgotten the first line, but goes on reading the page.
I came there once.

I don’t remember why. In such places, reasons fade like footprints in wet clay. You arrive and sense: you were expected — not as a guest, but as a dream. I sat on the wooden veranda, my feet touching ground that wasn’t quite earth but the held breath of the planet. I meditated — not in posture, but in presence. In silence, in waiting, in a patience that bordered on devotion.

Time did not pass there — it hung, like spiderweb in a beam of what no longer is.
I waited. Not for an answer — for an echo.

At some point, the mist thickened, and it was as if the borders between the world and the one who sees it dissolved. From that milky timelessness emerged fireflies — like whispers of flame in a cold dream. Small, dim, they flew as if writing letters to someone already gone. One of them, unlike the rest, seemed to sing. I heard no sound — I felt it, as one feels wind when the wind is no longer outside you.

It circled me, leaving a trail of light behind it — like a comma after a thought.
Its flickering whispered: Sat Narayan. Sat Narayan. Sat Narayan.
It was not a name. It was an essence.
Not a mantra — an answer.

O noble one, let not your mind be distracted. If it is, it will lead you away from the path of liberation. Recognize all things to be like dreams and illusions. Do not fear the beyond. Realize this — and awakening is near

— Bardo Thödol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead)

I do not know how long I stayed there.
The house, as ever, stood in the mist — and perhaps, it stood within me.
And maybe, one day, you will find yourself there too.
Not by path, but by memory.
And you will understand that this house is not merely a house — but a place on the map of your soul, where at last, you might hear the silence.