I was reading about a hike up into Griffith Park and I remembered that when I moved to this apartment, I could walk out my door and get to the top of Mt. Hollywood up above the Observatory. It took three hours, door to door. Today I thought, I couldn't do that now - I'll never do that again.
I remember the incredible lust I felt when I was 19 in Florence and met an American boy who looked like Marlon Brando. It was immediate, intense, a movie camera's quick zoom as our eyes met for the first time. We walked all over the central city, and at one point he stopped me and went into a flower shop. It was overwhelming, that he was in that very instant choosing a flower to give to me, and as I waited outside, I was trembling, actually trembling. Possessed by, taken over completely by a desire that knows it won't be very very long before it is fulfilled...Today I thought, I'll never feel that again.
There is a longer and longer list of things I can't do anymore or (probably) won't feel again. Physical things. Emotional things. I miss some of them very much. But thinking about them now isn't depressing me or filling me anxiety. Instead, those memories and lost possibilities and very natural human desires are right now all of a piece, swimming all at once and together in the golden cloud of the present, of this very moment as my fingers touch the keys, as words form on the screen in front of me, as I connect with what seems to have finally, at long last come - the sense of joy of being me, here and now, of expanding out into whatever it is I mean when I say "I". There are many words - surrendered, accepting, confident that meaning is always to be found, that freedom is always possible -- and beyond the words, an undifferentiated connection between myself and the world. It's taken everything, absolutely everything of my being and my life to get here. And that's all right. Here, right now, all judgment is silent. There is only me and my being spreading out and out...and out.
