_____2/27: “I’m tired, maybe more tired than I even realized. My body is achy and slow, my mind wants to gorge on comfort. I’m not scared, at least, not the way I was a few days ago. But I am a bit…numb.
____I’m thinking about learning to accept my own love. I’m thinking about how wonderful it feels to do things without paroxysms of guilt. I’m tired and my heart hurts.”
____3/22: “I dreamed strange and endless dreams last night. I was at a mountain lake where my mother had been young once. I was in a home filled with technologies I didn’t know how to use. The dreams seemed to go on forever.
____I woke, convinced I’d slept the whole day away; it was 3:36 a.m. I can feel the outlines of something beginning to take shape. Something is coming; what exactly, I don’t know. Something fine and subtle, perhaps, something important to handle well. I wonder what it will turn out to be.
____It’s supposed to rain in the afternoon.”

____3/3: “It was hot – brutally, meltingly so – and so I continued on, except soon I found an invitingly open door in a huge red wall. Inside was a series of huge white buildings, each housing either an enormous gold Buddha or a mirrored spire. I saw no reason not to sit on the plush red carpet under the gently breezing fans. That’s how they get you – come for the respite from heatstroke, stay for the heartfelt love.”
____4/2: “I ended up wandering up the forested hill, with the vague idea of reaching the crest to see the mountains, when I came to a round brick hut. Just as I determined it was probably someone’s home and turned to leave, a voice called out to me to come in.
____Inside was a bearded man in a turban and a loincloth, sitting on the floor. He made coffee and told me how our lives only last a week – we are born one day, die another, and sleep through a further two and a half. He showed me his shaligram; explained the five years when he’d lived on top of a mountain and learned to eat the cold; told me about his guru, who had been dead some 13 years now.”
____3/25: “I can’t quite put the Rinpoche into a category. He does not shy from the material world as one would expect a high spiritual teacher to do. That said…and it’s possible I was imagining it because it’s what I expected to see, but in his eyes I am sure I caught the spark. You know – the one that says ‘Are you in there? You get that we’re just playing here, don’t you?’”

____4/3: “It’s going to hurt, in ways you won’t understand, and when you start to understand what you lost, it’s going to hurt all over again. I’m sorry – I wish I could save you from that.”

____3/15: “Perhaps that’s why she’s so scared of the nameless shadow, of giving herself over fully, of not being on watch. The moment of orgasm; being in desire, in sensation, before knowing how it will be received. Healing is leaping into the abyss and discovering it to be a feather bed, and she’s leapt into the abyss and fallen very hard. In that way, I think, she envies the shadow.”
____3/7: “The other day, I heard someone say it must be nice to live with no meaning, no ambition, because you could be satisfied doing anything.
____To be satisfied, to receive in abundance – can it coexist with a sense of purpose, if purpose is defined by the struggle for? Can you “have” abundant meaning?”
____3/22: “Graffiti from the rooftop of the Shangri La hostel, Kathmandu: ‘The essence of love is this: we must die to what is already dead to live for what is already alive.’”

____3/22: “I hold fear in me, and tiredness too. When I walk through the crowds flowing in the Thamel streets, I can feel myself un-becoming. And yet- and yet. I am, I feel so sure, exactly where I am supposed to be. I’m dancing a quick dance, and it’s not one I recognize, but my heart feels strong and sure, for all its fear.
____Like stepping into a rushing river – to retain anything, from my feet to my sense of self, is asking for disaster. Better instead to accept and accept, death and death and death.”
____3/20: “I like being able to feel the thickness or clearness of my mind; I anticipate it being a journey I continue to explore for a long time to come. There’s peace in that – I like being a part of a process of love that’s larger than I can grasp.”
____4/18: “I don’t want to be a system referencing itself. I find myself with little interest in presenting myself for knowing; better to be, and in the process, be known.”

____3/20: “Another thing at the monastery that I loved was the chanting. When we’d do it together, I could feel it in my chest. It was tough sometimes, partly because it was all in Thai and it took so much attention not to mess up too badly, and partly because the first one came at 5:30 a.m., well before breakfast. I loved, though, that for four days, the first words I spoke each morning were praise and devotion to the loving, living spirit of the universe, with a group of women whose relationship to me was like that of an elder sister.”
____4/13: “4. A little space – between thought and action, between inbreath and outbreath, between experience and identity, between consciousness and mind – will do wonders for you.”

____3/15: “Layers and layers and layers of protecting. I long, I long, I long for a safety and protection I can barely imagine. I deserved to get to be soft and gentle and happy – I was so good at it once. Somewhere under all the fear, I’m so good at it still.”
____4/3: “What do I need from her? And why does my chest swell with grief when I think about it?”
____3/17: “Where does one’s heart dwell when one is feeling small and alone? I would make it a little home, and fill it with love.”
____4/5: “I often feel the most like myself alone, at night, somewhere new. I think I haven’t had time to make up an idea of myself yet, and so I just am, resting in nothing, unformed like the spaces between breathing. I like it. I recognize myself; I recognize the peace in my heart from a time when I was very young.”

____3/21: “I fear that advancing deeper into love-like-god is to retreat from love-like-people. And I find I want both.
____How can love be both personal and unconditional?”
____4/2: “When I looked in his eyes, I felt there was something he wanted me to say, or perhaps to understand. When I looked in his eyes, I saw someone who loved the light of god so dearly that he had no love left for the dark, the physical, the cyclic. I saw an eye yet turned towards escape.”
____4/6: “I still have so many ties and desires, and I don’t want to let it all go. I want the cool hat in the shop on the corner.”
____3/5: “I need to think some more about the difference between wanting something, and expecting it. When I do the first, I very often get it; almost the moment I begin on the second, everything goes haywire.”

____3/15: “I’ve been thinking a good bit about my own flaws. Self-obsession is one – another is how hard a time I have resting. I somehow manage to be utterly obsessed with my own mind without giving it an ounce of compassionate care. I treat myself like a problem to puzzle out, but I’m blind to solutions that don’t involve challenge, sacrifice, restriction, difficulty, hard work.”
____3/21: “I do not – I can not – offer what a girl is “supposed” to offer. I can’t come to every-Friday-night dinners-with-parents, can’t sign a lease and agree to all the laundry if you’ll take all the dishes, can’t provide stability and routine and a show we’ll watch together, start to finish. I can’t even explain in a satisfactory way why I can’t, because the answer seems to be that if I meet a Rinpoche at the passport check and I’m too tied up in my obligations to you to follow that thread where it leads, then my soul will almost certainly shrivel and die. It is of critical importance that I wander through death and rebirth according to the holy steps of my dance, and I cannot yet imagine who could love me, and yet hold me loosely enough to allow for that.”
____4/2: “I’m learning again what I learned last year; to trust myself, my wants and my whims, my own heart.”

____4/8: “I had the loveliest chat with an ex-Vajrayana monk today, who’d traveled from New York to Barcelona to Australia to Malaysia, sharing Buddhist teachings. I’ve never met a monk who’d stopped before. He saw great value in pauses and rests.”
____4/13: “Consistency and constancy are not interchangeable concepts. It’s pointless to try to never depart; it’s critical to always return.”
____3/20: “Four whole days’ meditation instruction with Venerable Bhikkhuni Dhammaparipunna – what a gift! She used a candle flame to show me how meditation isn’t thinking about, but feeling into and discovering through attention. She talked about how everything we’re made up of is the same as what’s outside of us, borrowed for a while until we die and give it back. She explained the space between breaths is a tiny death, and had me hold my breath at the end of an outbreath, and I swear – I felt it, real and in my body.”

____3/30: “Luxmi would prepare breakfast and it would sit, sometimes for hours, until some undetectable signal, and we would eat. Another period of time, and then neighbors would pass and chat; I’d read a bit, we’d feed the goats. Again, an invisible signal – there was no pressure, excitement, no rush of enthusiasm to work, nor did it come with dread or aversion. A time simply came, the same as any other, and now we were working.”
____3/7: “It’s really rather nice not to have to exist.”
____3/20: “She left me alone to meditate after our third day together. I watched my breath, and I found myself watching my mind, the way you watch smoke rise off of incense. A thought would come up, and I could see the whole thing flutter. Then, as I watched, it would grow still again.”
____3/22: “Graffiti from the rooftop of the Shangri La hostel in Kathmandu: ‘Live in the present, and everything else will come at the right moment.’”

____3/3: “The breeze blew in through the door, and I felt I knew something I’d known when I was little about love.”
____3/31: “I’ve spent the day alone today – happily alone, eating and walking and reading and napping and painting. I feel I’ve finally come unstuck in time again, floating in the wonderful endless now with my best friend, all of creation. I had wondered where my process was taking me, and now that I’m back now again, I can’t imagine anywhere else I could have been brought.”
____3/25: “Our divine nature is inherent, and we can awaken to it at any moment. Everything – not just transcendence, but suffering, not just renunciation, but sin, not just what is good, but everything, exactly as it is – may be the vehicle to freedom.”
____4/3: “And you’re right, you should know that. You feel like you’re right because you are right – about that magic, about your very self.”

____4/5: “The perfect peace of this moment is unbelievable; I feel as full as I feel. But any way of describing that a thing is itself makes no sense in retrospect, and so I’ll provide those details which are not exactly what it is that I’m talking about.”
____3/31: “I am so lucky; my heart is warm and I’m babbling about God again. My laziness, my penchant for indulgence, it’s not a mistake! My changeability, my withdrawn nature, my tendency to caricature myself, my selfishness, no mistakes. It’s not that my addictions or shortcomings or fears don’t exist, or aren’t actually how I perceive them to be; it’s that they are supposed to be my addictions, shortcomings, and fears. They’re perfect, too.”
____3/15: “Let me insist upon you. Do me the honor of allowing me to love you.”
____3/31: “And the whole time, we were the both of us just right there – talking to the beloved, who’s shown up this time as a stranger. It was warm and wonderful and fantastic, without being special in the slightest.”
____4/15: “All of these ideas orbit narrowly around what exactly I mean, which is an insight just beyond the reach of language.”

____3/5: “I take great issue with the idea that my body is holy when being looked at, but profane when being lived in.”
____4/5: “I flew today on a plane whose danger I didn’t apprehend, until the driver taking me to my hotel told me the same one went down in bad weather just a few months ago, killing 74 people.
____I didn’t die. I ate lychee candy and met a fashion designer whose boyfriend’s luggage had gotten stolen.
____This, I’m learning, is how things go – always to extremes, except for when they’re somewhere in the middle. I am always experiencing some ecstatic revelation of that same secret I’ve always known, or else undergoing some trial that demands the fullness of my heart, or else fidgeting vaguely about eating lychee candies and wondering if maybe I shouldn’t be.”
____3/22: “Graffiti from the rooftop of the Shangri La hostel, Kathmandu: ‘You can’t find peace by avoiding life.’”

____4/13: “Shame’s proper relationship is with what you do, not who you are.”

____4/18: “I’m enjoying right now, but I don’t particularly need it to last longer. I’m looking forward to what’s coming next, but I don’t particularly need it to hurry up and arrive.”
____3/7: “I haven’t earned my place here. I don’t deserve it, because it’s not the sort of thing that can be earned or deserved. Things happen, and I watch them, and at the same time, I am things.”
____4/18: “Open your mouth, even when you aren’t sure what will come out. I love you. You’ll always find me again.”
____3/30: “I can tell you I learned about gratitude and privilege; I can find a million ways to talk around the experience. But the thing itself, now, belongs to the past.”