Baraka_Guru

We have now reached the halfway point, but that is of no consequence. 'Everything has consequences,' she laughed, 'they are the heartbeat of experience.' The flightiness he exhibited at critical moments made of him a most problematic hero in any situation. But a word of caution: one can usually flee a social situation or a heated confrontation, on most counts, but one cannot flee one's own mind. Confused about the boundary between inside and outside and even more about what might separate the profile of his head from that of an enormous orange bird in despair he sits on a bench along the boardwalk. Above which the skies glowered with a deepening purple hue, as though it were a welt running its painful course with uncanny hurriedness. Seeing in this movement a reproach he resolved to allow his bird self to separate entirely from his human self, rear itself up and tear at the flesh of the next hurried passer-by. Carrion: His firstborn's name. And yet, he would not take his coffee double-double, like any other self-respecting human being. Simply because the burden was far too heavy and the bag too flimsy to hold the weight. Meanwhile far overhead pieces of boxes of partially cooked chicken were sliding about the cargo hold of a jet, banging repeatedly against the hatch which seemed, unaccountably, to be about to let go and then reason why such an extreme was not only possible but necessary. She appeared, like mist in the darkness of a dreary night, and as she stepped into the lamplight, he noticed she had scribbled out the 'is near' part of her sign, leaving 'the end', clearly visible.

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot