I’ve been reading this blog for perhaps a couple of years now. It never fails to be interesting and thoughtful and illuminating. But this is my favorite piece, ever, in those two years.

Goodness, what evokes this entry? (Perhaps, given a different syntax, the question answers itself). Arlene, this is amazing stuff. So few of us are so in tune with the turn of our own minds, the cycles of our own existence. Generally, it takes the passage of years to be able to see the patterns into which our lives are woven, and here you are, sensing the threads as they come together. What a tapestry you’ve created over these years, and what perception you bring to its ever-unfinished unfurling.

I have plenty of more concrete responses: I want to tell you that I think it’s literally true that our lives are supposed to extend through perhaps a thousand years. We never reach adulthood, moving from adolescence, as we do (most of us), straight to the fragility and rigidity of old age. I think it’s literally true that we experience lifetime after lifetime, further opportunities to create and grow and become ever more transparent to the universe. What sense would our lives make otherwise, tiny islets within an infinite span of existence? If we are part of some whole, mustn’t we in some way contain the essence of that whole? I want to tell you my personal version of the psychobabble that seems inevitably to arise as we interpret others’ experience though our personal metaphysics: your house, your life, your pain, your love.

But none of that is necessary. The only just and correct response to your writing is a moment of silence, a nod, a smile.

(Or, it seems in my case, a hoary blast of words).

I don’t think you need anyone advising you. I don’t think you need any exercises. I don’t think you need any conceptual overlay through which to understand your experience. Life is leading you toward exactly what you seek, and the totally fucking amazing thing is that you’re right there listening, receiving, and—you might as well accept it—trusting what you find. Your body/mind/spirit (boy, we need some new words in this language, don’t we?) is a finely tuned instrument, a shard of All That Is, a piece of God.

You live, the lotus grows.

Thus endeth the rave. Namaste.