While drinking cold tea from a glass jar and dividing your thoughts between Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Neruda, you cut a kiwi in half the long way and consider the oval ring of black seeds at its heart. You always see Our Lady Of Guadalupe there, proving that eating a piece of fruit can be a private ritual, an example of eco-psychology, a rite of passage, an odyssey.
It occurs to you how disposable – though indeed miraculous – your body is. To your mind it is sacred, almost holy, containing all the memories of your life, your ancestry. You sit there, sipping your tea, and contemplate how not-sacred your body actually is. How it is an idea that exists only inside a human mind.
You shed the illusion, leave it behind like a shipwreck you swam ashore from, like a prince giving up all worldly pleasures to go be a hermit. You decide to relax into Being until the time comes for you to pass into Non-being.
Finishing the kiwi fruit, it occurs to you that when life becomes too fixed – too rigid – the Trickster god comes in some form and rattles you to the bone.
Wiping your mouth on your shirt sleeve, you remember that in Hong Kong there are architects who build skyscrapers with huge holes in them “for the dragons to go through“.
C.M. Rivers 