You, Multiples Without End

 

Adore steps into the crosswalk wearing a leopard-print mousseline gown with nude slip and stocking boots, reading aloud The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo. As a mother, she has died for her family many times. And her love goes far beyond them––treating all she meets with equanimity & compassion. Adore’s lived so many lifetimes, things might have been more of the same had the underpinnings of everybody’s world not just collapsed & her hysterical strength kicked in. She lifts entire buildings off the ground, whole city blocks, to save children & parents trapped inside. This is because in the Garden of Agony, you get to repeat all your errors as long as you like. She is able to see it all as inseparable––as a single woven cloth made from lotus leaves, as tranquility sent down by the Sakina into her heart, as bodhisattvas appearing as rainbows in the sky.

 

 

[Published in The Ongoing Saga I Told My Daughter: Expanded Edition.

© 2016 by Jim Cohn.]