(Sunday)

I am hugely disturbed by TV babies designed as if they spoke like adults. "We don't know how to talk about children any more." 

Today was a good day, whatever that means.

I would like to learn to play the harmonica. I also want to stun people with my voice and a guitar. Sometimes I am driven by ego. Then I feel proud of myself for being aware of the times when ego drives me. Then I have to laugh because this pride also comes from my ego. If I keep breathing for long enough I will touch for a moment that place where I do not feel pride or shame, only love.

When I was in Guatemala I was very sick with a lot of things and I lived in a small concrete room with a thin hard mattress and no windows. I didn't go out late at night because of the men who followed and grabbed at me as I walked faster back toward my room, so I went home after school or after meeting a few friends in a cafe or at the place that sold large bowls of papaya for less than three dollars. I would close the door to my room so people couldn't see me from the courtyard and then I would read and when I couldn't read any more I would write. As I wrote I would grow more and more aware of how sick I was, how scared and alone, and so I would write, over and over again in that paper-blue journal, that I was immersing myself in the river of lovingkindness, that this river is the truest part of this world, that I was surrendered to it and embraced by it and that there was no need to be afraid because I was part of the river, and the river is nothing but love.

I wrote it until I believed it, and then I would fall asleep.Sometimes I remember this river, swimming in it, but I have never been so aware of it as when I lived in that small concrete room with no windows and a thin hard mattress. Also in Guatemala I bought a colorful tapestry from a small Mayan woman and taped it to the concrete wall, the nearest thing to sunshine. I saw her at least five more times while I lived in that country, each time in a different town, an unexpected corner of the city. We would chuckle and smile and shake our heads in disbelief, unorchestrated companions.


Yesterday for the first time since they were put to sleep I cried for my two old dogs, for how young they once were and how young I was when I first held them. They were good dogs, loving and loyal, who would sit with me on the stairs every time that I cried. And such personalities!

Now I am drinking seltzer with fat hunks of frozen mango in it and I am writing after a whole day spent outside, and really I am leading a wonderful life; I am grateful; I am awash with love.