Blue caravan Locked up in a blue Handful of sticky hot ashes and glue Washing my nose with a sore tooth And a glass of drowned love: The broken leaf blurs the eye again Will an illusion recover another one? A long time ago, I scraped my arm on the road To Avalon or Timbuktu I don’t know It looked like an ordinary Sunday In irritation and sorry lands
Frozen in a bleached sight Of red caps and gunned ants Bellowing the guts with a smile And a drip of blood: The broken leaf blurs the eye again The illusion is just a step ahead Do you sometimes hate me because I live, because you live, in different lives? Love is the caravan that milks the sand. (Caracas, marzo del 2003)
“The innocent mistake that keeps us caught in our own particular style of ignorance, unkindness, and shut-downness is that we are never encouraged to see clearly what is, with gentleness. Instead, there’s a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, then we would be happy.”
– in ‘The Wisdom of No Escape’, by Pema Chödrön
