How about this -- in obsessively looking for more on Li Po, I decided to harangue the author of the book I've been working on for the past three years. He, in turn, did some more investigative reporting. And here's a beautiful alternate translation of the text I love, courtesy of Prof. Paul W. Kroll:
Now, since heaven and earth are the travelers' inn of the myriad creatures, and light and shadow are the passing visitors of a hundred ages, this floating life is like a dream.
-- Li Po, from "Preface for a Banquet on a Spring Night at the Garden of Peaches and Plums."
I'm thinking about this as Roxy is in another round of surgery. It's odd to have so much power over the life of an animal, yet feel so helpless. I can't explain anything to her. Thinking about her being alone in the hospital last night was excruciating. My suffering becomes her imagined suffering, and vice versa. Does consciousness make things less scary, or more?
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