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# A View From Within
- URL: https://www.smoothpebbles.org/a-view-from-within/
- Published: 2026-07-23T20:03:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-04T01:10:41.000Z
- Author: Richard Flanders

What does it feel like to be a mind?  
A mind alive behind the eyes,  
seeing within the darkness.

The senses enter like waves:  
fragrance, sound, light, pressure,  
breaking upon an inward shore  
alive with color and meaning.

Thought gathers beneath the surface,  
rising in a cognitive mist,  
illuminating hidden scenery  
before breaking into form.

Images kindle images.  
Words glimmer at the edges.  
Memory opens translucent chambers,  
layer beyond layer of imagination,  
ebbing, flowing, vanishing,  
leaving faint traces on the shore.

Ideas rise first as impressions,  
brief illuminations  
crossing the mental landscape,  
threading webs of consciousness  
into lattices of meaning.

Some thoughts arrive as reason,  
stone laid carefully upon stone.  
Others flash through hidden corridors;  
intuition’s white fire,  
knowing before it knows why.

And beneath them all drift  
gossamer traces of mentation:

Half-formed faces,  
unspoken sentences,  
echoes answering echoes,  
a thousand small beginnings  
vanishing before they are seen.

Under the thinning fog,  
the surf curls and creams  
almost without sound,  
thought trying to form itself  
at the edge of consciousness.

Then the mind turns inward  
upon its own quiet rumination.  
The watcher notices the watching.  
The fire becomes aware of the flame.  
And from somewhere within  
the hidden theater of being  
comes thought reflecting upon itself:

What am I thinking?  
And who is it that asks?