208. This week I read the "focus" chapter in "The American Yoga Association’s New Yoga Challenge." What you wrote is really what I do when I’m putting jewelry together – the opening part about "listening to the creative voice of our inner self" and holding that point of attention and allowing the creative thought to come through in "a sweet, free-flowing experience." I just get quiet and focus on the gemstones in front of me and put them together. It’s kind of a mess – everything has to be spread out and I have to look at them and feel them, and then they seem to tell me which ones would like to be together. And like school kids, sometimes when they get put together, they fight, so I have to separate them again and try another grouping, until it feels sweet. The process itself is sweet, which is why it feels right, like truth. I’ve only realized this recently. It’s not something I learned in school, although I think a lot of artists do this intuitively. For me, it was the Yoga that pointed the way. Now, even though I’m in a sculpture class working with other students, and there’s all this chit-chat going on, there’s still that creative silence present, even though I may be joining in with some of the conversation. It surprises me that this can happen, but it’s really very sweet to be able to work like that.

I was also thinking about that note you’d written when you sent the bracelet about "the egotistical hold on the moods of the gunas" and what I could do about that hold. I started to see that that lovely feeling that came to visit during periods of quiet was actually always there, not just visiting, only I was too busy listening to other voices to realize it. Last week, on a fluke, I picked up a book called "Hardcore Zen" at the library. I just started reading someplace in the middle on reincarnation and it said something about the fact that we are part of the divine, rather than the divine being part of us. So it’s always there, whether we live or die, and that asking about reincarnation is sort of irrelevant. This part of us being part of the whole helped me to understand the contact with the sweet feeling that I thought was Durga. It’s as if, in moments of quiet, that Mother-of-the-Universe is revealed, she’s always there, but because of the egotistical hold of the gunas, we can’t see her. It’s been very freeing to realize that. There are still back-slides, when I think that "I" do this or that, but then in a moment of silence, that egotistical hold relaxes a little and the bigger picture emerges again.