I've had an amazing year in terms of learning to inhabit my body all the way out to the edges: previously I always felt like I was encased in something, like my sensation only went to someplace a centimeter below my skin, and then suddenly I expanded and my sense of being goes out to the level of my skin and beyond. I've started to break down the barrier, the sense that the body is something that carries the self somehow: that the body is the spirit's transportation rather than its incarnation. The mirror incident moved me into a place where I'm once again fascinated by my body and the way it changes and the wonderful things I can make it do when I let go, and the way I can feel emotional blockages connecting to muscles.

Growing up I was sort of average-sized, maybe a little taller (and chubbier, at one point) than most, but nothing special. So I have this image of my body at 15, kind of muscular but I think mostly scrawny. And then I see myself in a mirror, especially side-on; or I look at or feel my legs doing something.

I'm fucking huge.

Really, I know I keep mentioning it, but I can't get over it yet. I don't know when this happened. I guess it was early 2002, after the sailing trip (when I was carrying less fat, even) that I found out I was a bit over 200 pounds; but it was only at the beginning of 2003 that I started to grow into it. And now it's just all kind of surreal but getting comfortable, and my brothers and parents are growing older too, and I have friends having children, on and on and on, and we accumulate our shared history of time and change and revelation and transformation, and we build communities and the communities age with their constituents.

Hmm. Sometimes it's better to let things be what they are instead of describing them.