email excerpt to C:

> You have a wider array of senses than I. You are the "artist" among us. There are a lot of pain and confusion that comes with that -- "unbearable lightness of being". I was just an artist-wanna-be. In the last few years I became more and more "heavy", and mediocre -- everything artisty "died in the comfort".

Interesting observation. I just found a quote from something I read a couple of years ago:

The worst that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make your slightly unhappy constantly. -- J. D. Salinger, De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period

> Indeed I have nothing to complain about that. Life is running its
> course and I feel lucky that I now lead a mundanely happy life.

Somehow I feel I am also following the flow of my life, and I have no clue where it is taking me next. Sometimes I love the excitement of unknown, but sometimes I want to experience the joy of "heaviness", because in a way the heaviness is also light--less struggle, less choice, less pain....

F wrote me once, "sometimes I think I'm in a window looking at world inside wondering how to get in". I thought it was very interesting. I wrote, "for a number of years I often felt the world is just a big piece of wall paper on the other side of a river, and I can only watch but I have no way to get in. Then I thought the world is just a big cooking pot, and people are just peas being cooked in the pot. Some peas got too much energy and fell out of the pot, and there's no way for them to get back in. The peas outside can just roll around trying to find other lost peas, or they will really get lost, or they will find some nice place (a piece of land?) and grow and enjoy the sun the wind...."

I don't know if I am in or out. I don't know if I should be in or out. At some point I will have to give up trying to answer this question. What can I do but to go with the flow of *my* life? I feel I can just watch the development of all our lives, separated, different, light or heavy, mundane or exoteric, yet all just part of the big thing that we call life.