There is a classic Zen koan that asks you to describe your own original face, the one you had before you were born. I've never come as close to being able to answer that question as I did the year my mother died. She had cancer and became bedridden for a very short time. During the last three or four days of her life, she began to change outwardly a great deal. She lost weight rapidly, and her skin began to tighten and become less wrinkled. She, in fact, began to appear transformed into someone very relaxed and quite young. She began to closely resemble photos of her that I had seen, pictures taken when she was in her early twenties. She was like a young woman who had dyed her hair gray as if on a whim - a restless echo of happier times. When I looked at her, I felt swallowed up in some kind of enormous gift. It was as if I had been given the opportunity of seeing my mother as she was before I was born. Time seemed really to stand still. And time because exceptionally real for me, only because it had ceased to exist. The woman before me was time. And I was time. And the room was time.
~ Gary Thorp, from 365 Nirvana, Here and Now by Josh Baran
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