I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.

TO YOUR KNEES Life will eventually bring you to your knees. Either you’ll be on your knees cursing the universe and begging for a different life, or you’ll be brought to your knees by gratitude and awe, deeply embracing the life that you have, too overwhelmed by the beauty of it all to stand or even speak. Either way, they’re the same knees.

I knew that if I allowed fear to over take me, my journey was doomed.

Sometimes one feels suddenly doomed by fate.

It came to me…that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.

But when I do feel all the strength go out of me, and I fall to my knees beside the table and I think I cry, then, or at least I want to, and everything inside me screams for just one more kiss, one more word, one more glance, one more.

I have a soul of lead
So stakes me to the ground I cannot move.

And with every step I took it became more impossible for me to turn back. And my mind was empty — or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound. I thought only, <i>One day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry.</i>

I was oppressed with the sensations I then felt; I sunk under the weight of them.

When I opened my eyes, I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with outstretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver. But I did not fall. From nape to heel I discovered myself bound to earth. I felt a sort of appeasement in surrendering to it my weight. Gravitation had become as sovereign as love. The earth, I felt, was supporting my back, sustaining me, lifting me up, transporting me through the immense void of night.

I stopped stopping and I stopped starting, and I allowed myself to be crushed by ignorance.

I've come too far, and I don't know how to get back.

When I believed that all the things I’d been before had prepared me for this journey. But nothing had or could. Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed. And sometimes even the day before didn’t prepare me for what would happen next.

It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.