On Wednesday I watched someone I love die. She was very brave and never complained or cried. I helped keep her company as her body stopped. Afterwards, a feeling zig-zagged through the room; the window overlooking the bright brown mountains rattled uncontrollably. Look, my mother said, and pointed at the red flower in the vase on the bedside table, whose head was now slumped.



Is it perhaps not that our aura is something that radiates from us, but IS us, the indestructible part of each and every person: the pure energy that remains veiled by belief in a personal god?



To put it another way, perhaps existence is at the circumference--at the whole complex of intersecting circles that we can only contemplate, but never master.


The fact that I always BELONG to myself even when I'm flung far ahead: like anime force fields, or circles in a pond, ever widening.



As firmly as a hand holding a stone. Held, however, so firmly, merely so that it can be flung a greater distance. But there is a path even to that distance.
--Kafka, The Zurau Aphorisms.



Outside it was spring. We left the hospital and walked into the mountains, taking a trail to which there was no end in sight.