So a major change occurred in early October. That's the what. But why? What happened?

There was a confluence of things that complicates and confuses what may have happened, and I'm deciding that all of the superficial, material things weren't it.

The change was much too sudden for any outside, material influences to be so effective. Including and especially cutting back on alcohol. That effectively happened afterwards; it wasn't it.

I'm tempted to pay attention to those days I thought I had succeeded in sabotaging my health and that liver/kidney failure was imminent, but . . . no. It felt momentous at the time, but maybe only as a superficial marker.

Any "facing my mortality" is not momentous, it's the norm. I didn't face my mortality and something in me changed. That would be sarcasm.

So I'm looking at the fringes.

In early October, I made contact with my cousin the day before she left for the U.S. to figure out where she was going to move with her children. I had known she was planning the trip for about a month, but I called right before she left, not knowing that fact. And she left. We got together the day she returned three weeks later, after the big change in my life had occurred.

Around that time, after my cousin left, I also read one or two chapters in a book that . . . did something. It's a book by a Tibetan lama of his commentary on teachings by one of the "greats" who basically is credited as one of the founders of one of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism.

It doesn't matter what book it was, the commentary doesn't matter, the lineage doesn't necessarily matter. It was just the encountering it after all my years of reading, studying, sitting, searching. It's different for different people, but anyone who stays on the path for however long it takes may encounter it (if one must know, the book for me happened to be Confusion Arises as Wisdom by Ringu Tulku and is his commentary on the teachings of Gampopa, considered a founder of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism).

It was an "I get it" moment. It was a scratching of the surface, nothing deep, I had been exposed to the teaching countless times in countless ways, but it was this time, in this chapter of this book by this author when the "OMG, I get it" moment happened. Reality, or the perception of reality changed.

And it was just the start. I've felt like I've been on a spiritual journey for all these years, but all that was just preparation. I'm just barely reaching the shore now to begin. All those years I thought I had been advancing on the path was just setting up the prep station, the mise en place.

Again, it's not the teaching itself. I can repeat it, I can describe the realization, but it's the same information in countless numbers of books. All you can do is . . . keep practicing. Dedication is a must. Levity is a must, a careful balance between doubt and confidence.

I want to say to be true to oneself and to listen to one's heart, but those are cliched crocks. You can be true to yourself, but if it seems like shooting someone would be true to yourself, I'm not going to recommend being true to yourself, yo'm say'n? You can listen to your heart, but your heart may be telling you some off-the-wall shit.

I'm getting ahead of myself, I still have no idea what happened.

Tie to my cousin? Maybe. We haven't had the greatest relations or communications while I've been in Taiwan. She sure wasn't any help when I needed her most when I first arrived.

But I'm willing to accept that maybe we are "entangled" souls or beings. As she put it, "when I learn, you learn". Our current relationship doesn't mean a whole lot to me now, I'll help as much as I can in these trying times of hers, but the relationship that is important has nothing to do with her and I as we are in this human, corporeal form.