Ngadas Village in Malang, Java

As the clouds rolled in and the crowds rolled out, we stayed. There was a sense of stillness among the six of us who were left, a sense that we were experiencing something more than just another selfie opportunity!

The stunning sunrise over the village was absolutely breathtaking.

After 8hrs of driving through the night so that we would arrive at this place to watch the sunrise maybe it was tiredness or aching limbs that compelled us to rest and not climb any higher up, or down, the forest trail that we had just emerged from, so we stayed. I sat on a wooden bench and scanned my surroundings of the forest valley below and I saw a little village nestled at the foot of the mountain at the edge of the valley with twinkling white lights and I felt all "Christmassy" and lovely inside. It reminded me of home and of my family. I let myself visualise all of them there with me, 'Click' went my camera as I took a photo so I could show them later where they had energetically been with me.

Mount Bromo in Java.

The photo was taken just in time before the clouds filled up the valley and started rolling up towards us. The taste of the air changed in my nose, mouth, lungs as it grew damp with rain and dense with cloud and I felt a merging from one thing to everything. The merging of worlds where everything just becomes one and connected and the same. There were no edges of my body like there was no way to define the shape of the cloud or the song of the bird that hung in the air. There was nothing around us that hadn't been whited out by cloud and yet we all knew there was more out there, underneath this blanket of weather. In this moment there was only peace.

Moments passed in silence as each of us experienced our own version of this blessed moment, when lazily the sky shifted from grey to a lingering pink that spread sunlit fingers across the sky as though God was parting the clouds like curtains to wake up the day. The sun lifted the clouds away to reveal a huge volcano that had before been unseen and returned the valley to us. As the sun rose higher in the sky we returned to each other and back to our selves but I couldn't help feeling like I had just witnessed one of the most profound lessons of my life.