Chiang Mai: In the Exhale of the Mountain, I Connect with the Dharma

Anything you bring mindful attention to becomes a mirror of the self. Even a mirror needs to be polished — and in the same way, whatever you meet with full presence, offering your strength, your stillness, and even your vulnerability, will reflect you back transformed: softened, clarified, and strangely whole. It can be a garden, a hospital, or even a stray dog. But perhaps most readily, it can be a place. When mind and place begin to interpenetrate, the boundary between them dissolves. The mind reflects the land, and the land reshapes the mind. A place can enter your being as deeply as someone you have loved. Because every place is part of a larger whole, a living pulse in the web of interdependence, to fall in love with one place is to begin touching the Dharma of the world itself.

Every morning, I woke up to the same view but different landscape — a quiet mountain, draped in clouds, rising beyond the window of my temporary room in Chiang Mai. It doesn’t speak, but it teaches. It doesn’t move, but it changes. And in that still, evolving presence, I find the Dharma breathing.

Buddha often pointed to nature when explaining the truths of life. The falling of leaves, the flame of a candle, the passing of the seasons — these were not poetic metaphors, but precise reflections of impermanence, interbeing, and the law of cause and effect. Nature was not just his backdrop — it was his mirror.

Staying briefly in this northern Thai city, with the mountain as my silent neighbor, I begin to understand what he meant. The clouds above the mountain are always changing — glowing in the morning sun, dark with rain, or disappearing completely. No two moments are the same. No form stays fixed. Watching this daily performance of weather and light, I see anicca — impermanence — in full display.

And yet, nothing happens in isolation. The rain feeds the soil. The soil holds the roots. The trees call birds. The birds scatter seeds. Everything is stitched into everything else — threads of life weaving an endless, intricate cloth. Paticcasamuppāda — dependent origination — isn’t a philosophical abstraction. It’s what’s happening outside my window right now.

Buddha didn’t teach in temples first. He taught under trees, beside rivers, on mountainsides. Because the teachings aren’t separate from life. They are life. Nature is not just a witness to the Dharma; it is the Dharma.

This mountain is not mine. I am just passing through its long story. But in witnessing it, in giving it my attention and awe, something happens — the line between the observer and the observed softens. Like the Dharma itself, it holds up a mirror. And in that reflection, I see not just nature. I see myself. Less solid, more fluid. Less separate, more whole.

In this stillness, in the soft exhale of the mountain each morning, the teachings don’t just speak — they sing. They move through me like breath through bamboo. And in response, I write.

The reflections of Dharma I’ve found here in Chiang Mai have not stayed silent. They’ve moved my hands to write two books on Buddhism and queer identity, and they continue to spill onto pages in the form of poems — quiet meditations, questions, and offerings that emerge from this slow, mindful witnessing. Each verse is a small act of reverence. Each line, a way of bowing back to the mountain.

The longer I stay, the more I notice how simply being with this mountain — waking up with it, watching its moods, noticing its changes — feels like a kind of meditation. Not the sitting-still kind, but the seeing-clearly kind. A return to awareness. To humility. To interconnection.

As Buddha said, “If you truly loved yourself, you could never hurt another.” When I see how everything in nature depends on everything else — and yet nothing tries to own or dominate — I realize he wasn't only talking about people. He was talking about everything.

This place, this moment, this breath — it’s all the teaching I ever needed. And every morning, the mountain reminds me: the Dharma is alive, and I am still learning how to listen.