Beyond the Map
Metaphors as Vehicles for Living Realisation
1. Heart of the Diamond
This essay did not begin as a plan. It began as a kind of pressure—subtle, persistent, irresistible. Not a thought, exactly, but a movement beneath thought. Something wanting to come into form.
Often my writing begins this way: a glimpse of something not yet defined, but drawing me toward it. In this case, it was an impulse to understand the deeper structure hinted at across a year’s worth of poems—each one emerging from the mystery, each using metaphor and image to catch the uncatchable, to point to the ineffable, to make sense of how to live in the world as the mystery embodied as me.
As I look back—especially now, having just launched a new website and a new shape for sharing—I notice a quiet coherence behind the expressions. Each poem, each essay, is a facet reflecting the same diamond core.
So today, as I wrote, I began to realize that what was appearing on the page was not just a collection of ideas about the world, but a reflection of how the world itself unfolds: not as a fixed system, but as an ongoing genesis—arising moment by moment from a source we cannot grasp but can sometimes feel.
