This Terrible Love, a journal of nonduality

  I have no idea whether anything I seem to write or say is ever understood. I don’t even understand what I say below the very thin veneer of apparent meaning, and I have no idea why I say it, or even who says it. At times there seems to be understanding. When the daughter of the couple from the village comes up and cooks, it seems there is communication and understanding about serving and eating food. I can say "pass the rumbledethumps" and she knows it refers to the potato dish she has prepared for me. We both have the same concept of what we call a potato. When I tell her life seems to just happen without volition or any one to have it, she seems to understand and sees that she has never chosen a thought or emotion. Do we have the same definition of thoughts and emotions? Are there any such things? Is a thought about a potato a thought or a potato? When I read people sharing opinions on events they say are happening in some world they imagine, as opposed to events

She was getting old, she wrote me, and she was filled with regret that she had spent decades at satsangs and retreats and watching videos and reading books about enlightenment. She said she felt she had wasted her life and she had nothing to show for it. I told her that all she felt had been wasted was her life; every smile and hug she shared with everyone else at every talk and every retreat, seeker and sage alike, simply human animals singing and talking and meditating and doing yoga and laughing and crying and sleeping and breaking bread together; her life was in every beautiful word that touched her, and that feeling of longing the words evoked was none other than her own love and beauty; her life was there in all the videos that perplexed her and annoyed her and also filled her with wonder and awe. I told her there is nothing to get, no unfinished journey to complete. I wrote "your life was never your own, it never passed you by, it is you, it is all and everything

Last night I was in the woods hunting for deer. I didn’t know what to do, but was with a friend who had a bow and arrow. Eventually she killed, cleaned and cooked the deer and the taste was vivid, rich. Then I seemed to wake up. There was a man in the dream whose face I can clearly see, a black beard and dark eyes and a skull cap, but who I have no recollection of seeing any other time. In the dream it was clear I'd known him for years, we were very close. My friend in the dream is here now, only her outfit has changed. I asked if she remembered deer hunting with me and she does not. But she remembered eating with me the seeming day before. The version of her in my dreams shared a history with me as well, but one that lived only within the world of that dream. When my friend Lynn was having cancer surgery and I flew back to the States and saw her, there were memories that would pop up randomly, and a feeling of familiarity. The feeling itself seems no more “real” than the f