This is an image of a ghost. I manifested it from a dream I had then it appeared. When I first tried to post this entry, it disappeared along with the words I spent writing over several months. No matter. If my newfound practice has taught me anything it's that all is fleeting and transient. It's a lesson I have to relearn each and every day then promptly forget each evening as the pangs of nostalgia and longing for things out of reach surround me like a thickening fog.

The original post, now lost to the digital dust bin, was about the capacity to be astonished. I felt it the first time I was in the desert overwhelmed by the arid beauty of time standing still. I felt it the first time I arrived in Italy, when Rome stood up and was exactly like my dream of it. When I was driving on Highway One along the California coast spidering its way through my memories of every pacific coastal TV show and movie  I've ever seen until I became a character in the story of my life. Or the first time I attached two pieces of film together and created this third thing in the world that didn't exist before. 

I thought about a canoe on a river at sunset with three people in it. From another time. Another age. And then it appeared.