I spent many of my teenage years assuming that I would not live much longer. "Tomorrow" was a dim concept, not one that I paid much heed. My reality, it seemed, was the present pain I felt. It was simultaneously inescapable and incomprehensible. What was it? Where was it? How did I know I was in pain? How could it seem so simultaneously static and fluid?

What a prospect, then, to think of the future. I could live for another sixty years. One day, I may be able to walk only by painfully hobbling about, and my bladder could gain a great deal of freedom from my will. I could attend my parents' funerals.

It seems so dim, so unreal. But so did 17, 20, 22. So did India, so did meditation, so did college.

I feel old. Though it doesn't feel the same as it used to, I can still see that pain. That incomprehensible, unnameable, elusively omnipresent writhing.

The future, life, death: it all seems so fresh, so promising. Intellectually it does, anyhow. There's still a plastic bag over my head preventing awareness of the richness soaking through this giant sausage called Ryan. But, when I'm lucky, I lie on the floor, and though the body seems transparent, I infer the heaviness, the darkness, the veil that pervades this little fellow. Good lord, the freshness in that!

Why does the picture here strike me as so fascinatingly ridiculous, beautiful, and touching?

"Do you have eyes but fail to see? Do you have ears but fail to hear? Don't you remember?" So said Jesus.

Walking back to my room this morning, I looked up at the sky. No words can capture the vastness, the stark and spontaneous beauty! Indeed, I sense these words cheapening the whole experience. But yet, it never fails to astonish me when I can stop and see the sky, really see it, really reflect it, really participate in its skyness.

And the sky is always skying. Always. But I am not. So though I may see the sky above, I really don't.

All the world, I assume, functions this way. All of experience, every phenomenon is a participant in this perfection. How could it be otherwise? All sensory experience, hell, all experience in general, is exactly as it is, performing its function spontaneously, naturally, freely. Even when some phenomenon seems to be unbalanced, out-of-place, planned and bulky; is it not unbalanced, out-of-place and planned just as it is? Only my will for things to be otherwise strips the universe and all that lies in it of its inherent perfection. That suchness, that wholeness, that vastness is perceivable through any phenomenon.

Yet, still, I fail to see it.

One day, I'm going to long to be able to hear my mother's voice again.

India, then a week-long meditation retreat. I'm tired, and feeling more open.

The functioning of the mind can work like trickles of water. The more a path is used, the easier it is for more water to flow that way.

What color the water is doesn't matter; it could be tinted with red or yellow, it could have certain tastes in it; that's irrelevant. The important thing is which particular direction it is headed.

I feel lonely tonight, which surprises me. This desire for closeness, for intimacy, for someone to be with... It's something I've often rejected. It felt too unbearable when I was younger.

But now, when I don't resist it, I see the sweetness in it. There's a lovely quiet to it, a softness. Nothing unbearable about the sensation itself. And as I feel that water flowing through me, rather than trying to change it, I feel it changing, itself.

Loneliness becomes openness; isolation becomes a feeling of wholeness. It was difficult in the beginning to give love and space when I could focus only on the anger I felt, but I'm glad I've been dedicating myself to that openness. Seems like the rivers in my body and heart have been following much more favorable paths.

Self-trust still doesn't come easily. It's a waterway I'll have to continue to dredge.