I have to write this down before I forget about it...

Yesterday was unusual in a way that I can barely understand. I got a feeling that is rare but welcome. Sometimes it sneeks up on me when I don't expect it, leaps at me from behind and alters my vision. I can still feel the residues of that climactic peace, I do not look different, this wall does not look different, but everything feels different. I can also feel it escaping me, vanishing into that unknown realm from which it came and greeted me. I nearly want cry at its loss. It is the feeling of inevitability that when you learn a precious secret you will all quickly forget it.

It started yesterday in the afternoon. I picked up this shirt, a light green button up shirt that I haven't worn for months. I held it in my hand, looked at it soberly, and then I felt it just a bit, maybe it was coming from the shirt. The shirt looked good to me and I decided to wear it.Thats the strange part to start with, that the shirt looked good, it has been some time since I could say why I wanted to wear this or that article. I am usually very unable to recognise an aesthetic quaility in these things which are my slaves, my standing reserve. I was confused for a moment by that. My father came to my room and told me that he was going to the store and that I should join him. I agreed and ran into the bathroom to change my shirt and to wet and comb my hair. I was thinking on the way to the store about my idea that science is the only true worship of god, that is, to spend your life in awe of his creation, looking at it and thinking of it constantly. I felt strangly at peace, it just wafted over me....

We arrived at the super market and it was not long until we were walking through the isles. I thought to myself "He alwas does this the old bastard, he will say we are here for one thing and then he will spend supurflous time idling through the isles and gazing at so many other things. Why does he have no sense of his own ridiculousness ?".. I complained and we moved on. Soon I had forgotten that I was there, why I was there, I was simply in the store now gazing at objects all around me... I picked up a cereal box and set it down again "Whe does it not move when I leave it ?"...My heavy eyes cought sight of a can of coffee and I longed for a hot cup of it "Why must I eat to live ?"...I looked at my hand which was holding a chicken carcass "how does my body move ?".. Again I looked at the coffee can "What is it in the constitution of that can which makes it behave like metal and this table like wood ?"... I just kept walking around looking at things closely gazing upon them and picking them up. I didn't trust them, they were all suspect to me, suspect to change the way the acted and start behaving differently. I thought "What holds the shape of these things which is stronger than the gravity of the earth ?"... and I thought should it suddenly let go I would explode with a force strong enough to rip the earth into dust. I found myself back in the car, heading home.. surrounded by questions of ever sort.. filled with much happyness at my understanding the answers "why are there mountains ?".... "what are clouds and why are they there ?"... and so on... But everything remaind a suspect to be unpredictable, somehow, explinations couldn't capture them.. they each had some nature, some individual place and time of being. It was as though they refused my understanding them..................

Later in the evening I decided to go out for a walk. I walked down the street, turned around, and walked back.. I was smoking at the time. I arrived in my driveway and was thinking about my life. That I was seven years old twelve years ago I remember being me.. doing things and acting ways. Little movies were playing out in my mind, springing up a jumbled scene, then vanishing. And that is when the feeling gripped me. It was me inside my mind, moving as I was moving at that moment. I saw it with my eyes and also in my mind like one of my memories.. Taking a drag off of that cigarette and feeling my presence among things. With it came a simple thought that shook me and elated me.. it was "One day you will be old and this very moment will be a memory, it will look like this." .. And I understood it clearly for a second, I am alive and will live a life..I felt peace, pure, simple, fantastic, I exist and live and I will age here and this is all a memory. That simple joy is so overwhelming, it carried me through the night, lighting the way for me...

I only get that feeling some times, rarely, but it is welcome when it comes... Regards Mike...............