In my next encounter with you, you are a dancing skeleton dressed in a salmon and cobalt sari the color of a transitioning sky, with patches of black and white hair matted to your skull. There is a pink flower near your right temporal bone behind where your ear would have been, a blue nose ring suspended from the triangle where the cartilage of your nose once was.
Are you real?
Something about your presence echoes and mirrors the three characteristics of existence, that suffering is caused by clinging or resistance to change and taking it personally. It also has resonances with Jennifer Welwood’s poem “The Dakini Speaks”.
What if you are also not real?
Something about your theater, cartoon-like Dios De Los Muertos quality makes your presence soft and elastic. Your dancing brings a light touch of joy making suffering, impermanence, even death more bearable.
You are a partial answer to the question “Why do I feel like a part of my life force is being diminished by the death or the suffering of another?” You are also unfathomable, irreducible. I will never get to the bottom of you, because my ways of looking will change based on my participation with you over time.
Who am I in the twoness between us?
Am I real?
I literalize the personal idea of empath, the one who gets overwhelmed, the one whose body is breaking down, etc.
What if I am also not real?
You imbue me with a light touch of joy, your theater, cartoon like quality, making me dance, laugh, and not take myself so seriously. I am closer to an appreciative understanding of emptiness than ever before. Causes and conditions have molded me, and malleable perception can melt the mold.
What is the space between us? Is it real?
It’s easy to fill up the space with props, a blank page with ideas.
What if the space is also not real?
The props could be interchangeable, the ideas not static, but changing based on the need moment to moment.
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