Greetings,
I asked for a Vietnamese iced coffee in an alley off a main street filled with jolly plastic Santa Claus armies and tinsel. Tis the season.
The young girl opened a Styrofoam box. She picked up a chunk of white ice in her left hand, cradling it inside a blue cloth. She slammed a hammer on the ice. It cracked.
Fissures of released pressure, jagged lines, imperfect beautiful lines spread deep inside the ice. She held global warming in her hot little left hand.
She smashed it again and again creating fragments of ice, chips, particles. She dropped the small block of ice back in the box. She collected chips in a glass, added fresh thick brown coffee extract, some condensed milk, a straw and a spoon. Done.
A piece of cold sharp ice pierced my left eye. The pain was minimal, cushioned by the delicious cold feeling as the ice melted through a retina, a pupil, nerve endings, tissue, layers of perception - then my vision altered its state as light transmitted new signals from rerouted optic nerves to the cerebral cortex.
It was the quality of ice and I began to reflect everything around me. The stimulant of ice this frozen water now becoming liquid was glass. The world is made of glass, crystals shimmering inside the kaleidoscope of ice. While the illusion appears to be smooth and clear on the surface, buried deep inside are long jagged beautiful lines filled with magic, mystery and sparkling universes, emitting glowing crystal rivers.
The world is ice. Everything you see, hear, touch, taste and feel is ice, a sibylline language of clarity.
Metta.
Before this woman became a butterfly she was a useful member of society. She is practicing here.