And as soon as I understood that, as soon as that reasoning, achieved with such effort, had reached down into me and struck something that said, “That is truth,” the driving days of questioning finished. I was whole again, but now with more assurance; it was astonishing how much the knowledge freed me, when I had already thought I was free. It was the beginning, the foundation, for all the things I learned here later. It was how I began to lose my name, my memory, the labels I’d used, and so my sense of all words. It happened over a long time, all the time here, but it began then.

I came out again, looked with surprise around me at the winter that had fallen while I had not noticed, and I began, again, to watch. I watched understanding that this was what existed, that at every moment what I saw and heard and touched and smelled was everything.

Some days I would see tracks, little paw prints in the snow, and a couple of times I caught glimpses of rabbits plunging through the yard, but mostly even the animals had hidden away like me and were also watching. It used to seem to me that the animals must long for the winter to be over, so that they could be free again; but now I imagine that like me, they simply see it, not with any longing for it to be finished, but just as part of what goes on.

I could stand at my windows and watch the snow come down, falling from some unknowable space out there, coming to rest on the ground, and then on the snow that had already fallen, piling itself higher and higher, and it insulated me, became a womb around my world. I became an infant and a child, unborn and born, sometimes going out into it to catch the flakes joyfully on my tongue with child-like delight, or throwing myself into it, making angels. The cold and the wet bit into my body. There was no sense of the ridiculous here because there was no one, not even the observing part of myself, who watched and judged. There was laughter; it was my own laughter, not at myself but coming from the joy. The first time I heard it I was startled because it did not seem it was a sound I had ever made before. It came bubbling out, no holding back, no forcing, just pure laughter. Where had it been before?

Sometimes the joy came up into my throat so that it seemed that everything inside was surging out, happiness that makes tears come. But more often there was calm, a sureness, and I might spend a day in bed, curled under blankets, reading or drawing or simply staring out the window. Time wasn’t the way it had been before. It was no escaping, no fighting. It was rhythm. It could be whatever I wanted.