I said to someone once, have you ever had the experience of falling in love?  They said yes.  Was there anything you could do about it?  I feel that in my life, that something is continually moving me in some way and taking me to a place I don’t know how I got there.

When I think about it I realize where did this thought come from before I had it?  And then I realize I didn’t have it.  It was handed off to me free of charge.  Maybe that’s the creative process in and of itself.  I find myself sort of awed by the process.  I realize wow, it happened again.  Whatever that it is that happened again.  So I find myself very humbled by it, seeing that I feel like I’m being moved.  People talk about projects that I’ve been involved in and quite frankly I don’t know how I got there. It wasn’t like oh I want to do this.  It felt like something took me, like a wave took a small boat and just moved it in a certain direction, and for me I realized there was nothing else that could happen.  There wasn’t anything I could do about it.  I said to someone once, have you ever had the experience of falling in love?  They said yes.  Was there anything you could do about it?  I feel that in my life, that something is continually moving me in some way and taking me to a place I don’t know how I got there.

Right.  You know my mother passed away six months ago at almost 91 years old and I had the pleasure of spending the last seven weeks of her life with her day and night at the hospital.  And when she passed, within minutes of her passing, I looked at her, her body on the bed, and I realized it didn’t look like my mother.  So my sister was in the room and I said Eva, take a look at this.  I said does this look like mom?  And she said no.  And I looked again because that was the thing that I identified with my mom, or at least I thought that was my mom.  Then I realized that everything that when I felt into my mom, when I thought about my mom, when I sensed my mom, everything that made her my mom I realized none of it was tangible, none of it.  There wasn’t a single quality, essential quality of connectedness, bonding if you will, that I had with that essence that I called my mom.  That was of a physical nature.  That was so profound for me in terms of us being the river because after the passing, one, I had no mourning.  For the two weeks before I went down that portion of the river with my mom but I didn’t experience mourning.  What I did experience is it felt like the energy of my mom, I don’t know how else to describe it, was wearing me like a large warm overcoat in winter.  And I felt myself being enveloped by her with a relationship that I don’t ever remember being so inseparable my whole life.  But what’s beautiful about it is I got to see again that what is peering through is not the identity and that the human body exists but it is not the essence that is animating it which is the heart of our humanity.