On the first night, we practiced meditations. We were told to empty everything: our past, our identity, our future. And I forgot these things, surprised by how easy it was. Perhaps it was because I feel I am wordless, that I have no definition. I sat on the top of the hill over the lake, and took everything in as my own, as the only thing I knew, because it was the only thing I had access to. I am a being who watches the moon over the water, I thought. I became dizzy with it, how fleeting it all was. Each moment was gone as soon as it was realized, the same as myself. I tried to forget fluidity, and felt at each moment that I was being born. A recurring bloom as the instant passes that limit, that smallest possible measure and becomes the next.

The sounds and the wind became so intense that it was erotic. I rocked my body back and forth, feeling penetrated by everything I sensed around me, and I had so much desire.

I felt uncertain. I felt pure.

The next day I went to him crying. I feel so heavy suddenly..., I told him. I'm scared that if I start talking now, I'll never stop, that there is too much, that I'll swirl around it in chaos because it is so undefined...I don't know where to begin, it is so amorphous.

A butterfly landed between us.

The butterfly is the female symbol of transformation, he said. Do you know what she's telling you?

I nodded. I let him write a poem about me and then left.

That night, I laid down in the middle of everyone. It was the ritual. And I had to purge. I started crying, and my old habits came back. I started trying to hold my breath, instinctively, and hyperventilating. I screamed out in a voice I had never heard before. I was terrified. And they came and put their hands on my body until I was calm, until I reached what I had to get to, until there was nothing left but myself.

No one said anything for a few moments after I got up. I was mostly unaware, still crying a little, still shaking, trying to make myself take deep breaths. I had been so quiet before then, I can imagine the shock. The flaws we all have are so profound, that when we admit them like this, with such vulnerability, it is impossible to maintain hypocrisy. I sensed this with the others, as well. I felt so moved, so close to their pain, that I cried, too. It is hard enough to admit such things to oneself, and then to share them, outloud, is so brave.

I felt that I had shown them my beast, but it is strange, because once it comes out like that, it is not such a monster. It is mostly scared and innocent. They embraced and kissed me and said how brave I was for going that far. There was such extroadinary kindness, I have never felt something so rare.