What was your face before your Mother was born?

There is an old zen koan an old girlfriend told me years ago: "what was your face before your mother was born?" Like all koans this one too, as I can now attest, is not solved by a declarative sentence, a true/false statement, but is felt beyond what the rational mind is immediately capable of affirming or denying. See, I've been sort of shut in recently and I got out for a bit today. The summer rains have pushed the river levels up really high and they'd dropped down to tolerable levels and I figured that maybe, on a lark, a few skamania steelhead might have made it up the Milwaukee River to the Estabrook dam. I checked it out and waded into the rich, tea-colored flow and drifted some spey flies through the foamy pools. I didn't catch a damn thing, though. But thats not important, you see, because in the dusky light blue herons flew overhead and caddisflies skittered off the surface film, I figured out that damned koan--or, rather, the koan solved itself. This suprised me, because I was not aware that I'd been working on its solution. As the orange sun was setting, the river sort of took me in as an old friend and partner, the ducks eyeing me with admiration from their eddies and rock islands. I felt clean and sharp, having shaved my beard some days ago and the old koan came up again what was your face before your mother was born? Somewhere between birth and death I got that one--I knew the answer to that question--wading in the river, fishing for a fish that was not there. Knowing the answer--or rather, feeling the truth of the question--I must have smiled. (I can't quite remember).