Moment in a Face Towel

Yesterday morning as I was drying my face a strange feeling came. There was not me, but just that moment pretty much, not someone drying her face on a towel, but that, too but the moment of it, not the towel, me, and the bathroom. There was the same moment, the same event, but the thing I call myself just wasn’t there. My body was there; I could feel the white towel on my cheeks and against my nose. My mind was getting all of this as well, but there was no sense of my being a solid, separate thing. An oldish woman was participating in a moment. No, not participating; there was only the moment. There was only a set of events unfolding—no not that either, really. Just something happening. No past or future. Just that moment. “I” was just a thing happening with all the other things happening and all of a piece.

I—the little of me still there trying to make sense of this—stood still for a moment or two, just noticing, holding the towel. Just the standing, as an image on a screen containing everything—all of it quietly humming, and also infinitely still.

It was a little scary. I was glad when it was over, in a way; Myself wasn’t sure I was ready to give up my self. But it was very real, and as I have remembered it throughout the day, I have strangely been able to call it back, to find that place again, I have an inkling that I might not exist as I think I do, but essentially as an element in an ongoing play of energies. At each moment, that energy is happening. There is something incredibly freeing, as if a weight has been lifted, to feel that there may be no bodily, brainly me. No “I” with a past and future. Just the moment like a hologram with something going around that has mistakenly for many years been seen as me by myself and by others who see themselves as their own “me’s.” Like I’m an old woman in a movie with only a light body, and a script, and the whole world watching. I wonder if it’s a good movie, or maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s the only show in town.

Serigraph by E. Berdett