Strange. I haven't been looking back at 2003.

Truth to tell, there's just not a whole lot to look at, and there should be even less, except for that curly-fry shaped branch of fate distracting what had been my path. As straight-forward as I may describe the monastery option, the actual path looks more like how the solid-rocket boosters of the Challenger went after it exploded. There, that's better – using a national tragedy to envision my life. Geez.

But that's kind of it; how my path blew up under me and reality flew apart at the seams. For once in a good way. And looking back, it all seems so hazy, less concrete, less defined by definites and absolutes. The idea of the monastery brought me back to a home with a vengeance and grounded me. It completed an arc of a storyline. Even though I still don't know how the story ends.

Music has been a constant in my life, a passion to pursue if I were interested in continuing living a material life. Otherwise, it's just a distraction, something to do.

Suicide has also been a constant, and a logical, ironic end to the story. Having an ironic end is always very attractive.

But this thing, and I don't know what to call it, has also been a constant. Calling it religion is too simplistic. Calling it an ongoing existential inquiry into the nature of being is too hokey. But it presented itself and resonated, and I pursued it and read about it, and it developed from a crude, cursory practice in a dorm room, sitting on laundry as a cushion, with a stick of incense stuck in a tin container for some anise liqueur, filled with sand that I stole from the local Oberlin golf course, next to the cemetery.

It was always a solo practice and I never talked about it. It was personal. I balanced what I read about monastic practice with what I felt made sense. I never blindly did something because it was written down somewhere as the thing to do if you were to be this or that. From the start I was uncomfortable with calling myself "Buddhist". I did, however, get caught up in thinking Zen=Buddhism. And in some ways it is, in others it isn't.

Through the years the idea of entering a monastery faded, but I continued my personal practice; always aware of and looking for signs, even when they stopped appearing; sporadically sitting, but everywhere I lived since college I know I had some set up, so I don't think I ever spent too long away from it.

So when the monastic option reared its pretty shaved head in 2003, all of this that had been in the background through the years washed over and washed reality out. And I couldn't even begin to describe what that is. It's like painting a masterpiece of a painting and then smearing it all up with both hands and told to describe that in detail.

What I said, not a whole lot to look at, because there's not much there. And even that doesn't describe it.