Miles stood at the summit ridge of Pico da Vara in the Azores, the clouds below him spilling like a broken ocean. He had hiked since dawn, his legs aching, his pack heavy with a few chanterelles and lion’s mane mushrooms he’d foraged from the damp forest trail earlier that morning.

At the peak, he looked up. The sky was so clear that it seemed infinite – galaxies glittering faintly in the daylight haze, the sun carving a golden path through the air. Below, the mist swirled, reflecting the same shapes: a river curling like the Milky Way, a cluster of rocks patterned like a constellation.

He thought of the phrase his grandmother had whispered to him as a boy: “As above, so below; as below, so above.” Back then, it sounded like poetry. Here, it felt like instruction.

Kneeling, he unpacked the mushrooms, their delicate gills like tiny universes turned inward. He realized each one held the same geometry as the stars – spirals, filaments, branching patterns. The cosmos echoed in the forest floor.

For a long time, Miles didn’t move. He felt the symmetry – his breath matching the wind, his pulse syncing with the slow beat of waves far below the cliff. The mountain was not beneath him but within him. The stars were not above him but through him.

When he finally descended, the trail felt lighter, as though every step was walking across both heaven and earth at once.

And that night, in a small café by the harbor, he ordered a mushroom stew, smiled at the steaming bowl, and whispered to himself: “As above, so below; as below, so above.”