Immediately after I wrote the blog post Sand Drawings I wrote the following journal entry which I will share in full (with a few modifications for clarity) here:

After I wrote the sand drawing blog I started thinking — how am I changing, decaying, just bits of matter, aggregated together, subject to decay like other bits of aggregated mater that exist in the world? Don’t my teeth wear away like kitchen knives? Doesn’t my skin dry and crack and sag like the old leather chairs? Doesn’t my hair grey like the leaves that change in the fall?

I think of kid Alana, how could I assume this adult Alana is the same? The forms are so very different from each other, and yet I called that ‘me’ and this present body ‘me’.  Just because I remember a series of moments (some not even all) between now and then, is that really my only justification for assuming Alana continuity?

What has decayed, broken, can I internalize further? My house has leaking window like my bladder has begun to leak. Years ago, when windows and bladder were ‘young’ the seal held perfectly, but now, not so much.  The padding and fluff in my favorite jacket is worn, like my body, both are losing shape, growing stretched and  saggy. Still usable, but not the old springy form of yesteryear.  I look in the mirror and see a face that has grown puffy, old, worn — when did that happen? I think back to the kitchen in my old house — slowly getting scratched, cabinetry gashed, drawers sagging; just like with my face, I don’t know exactly when the worn out look started, but somehow, overtime, it became dated.

I went to the drawer and pulled out some old pics of my family. So many  folks dead and gone already — dad, grandma, grandpa, the dogs. For those of us still alive,  Seth my mom and I, we all look so different now. The pics don’t lie. The change in form has begun already. I remember my dad’s corpse. It looked so different than when I saw him during his last visit to San Fran, before he had gotten sick. So why don’t I think I will hit point death the same way as dad, grandma, grandpa,  and the dogs?

I looked at pics of my dad again– I know that I loved him so much. I know. I know it hurt when he died. But I can’t exactly remember the moment of his death. I can’t feel it now with the same acute sense of loss that I felt then. By now, that pain has sorta gone away. And yet, when I experience the moment of loss, the knowledge that in the future it will go away/diminish, just the way my feelings of loss of my dad have,  it is no help at all.  It doesn’t eliminate the pain. I know that when I next lose someone I love, my brother perhaps, or Eric, the pain will be extreme.

I keep thinking being a good Buddhist is about being a good person, via my standards. But the truth is that a ‘good Buddhist’ is  just someone thoroughly fed up with the pain of loss. Someone who is fucking done. And someone who sees the obvious — that form will keep shifting, change will keep coming, loss and decay and death are unavoidable. Why isn’t that perfectly clear to me yet? The evidence is everywhere.

Last night, I went to a workout class. My teacher kept criticizing me, “Your spine isn’t aligned Alana, you don’t use the right muscles in your back, why are you moving from your quads instead of your hamstrings?’ It was such a hard, emotional sessions, I almost cried. I thought to myself, “for fuck’s sake,  if I could do better I would do better, I surely would, I want to move perfectly, I want to be successful, I want a teacher who is  proud of me.” But the thing is, right now, I can’t feel correct alignment, I don’t have the nuanced body awareness required to turn certain muscles off and engage other muscles instead. The force of my habitual movement patterns are too strong.  And that right there is the same exact reason I can’t see the truth of this world — the force of my habitual patterns of thinking are too strong. The thing is, after decades of yoga, body building, pole dancing, I know, the way to change movement patterns is through practice. Guess I know how to change habits of thinking then too…