Leonor Henríquez

leer en español      You suddenly wake up, half drowned in an unknown place, one could say hostile, even though everyone around you tries to make you as comfortable as possible.You don't know whether to cry, scream, struggle.Forgotten feelings that resurfaced in a recent conversation.I was moved while watching the guests at a beautiful celebration.The older ones frolicking in a ball pool and the younger ones crawling on the carpet.Immersed in the vapors of that kind of trance that some call “Déjà vu” (in French, “already lived,” only more than thirty years ago) I started talking to a young mother who was holding her baby in her arms.- Oh, how pretty, what's her name? - I asked.-  Ana - she said.- And how old is she?- Four and a half months.- How beautiful! How does she behave, does she sle...

leer en español      The lady entered the room accompanied by one of the volunteers.We had been warned that one of the participants in the event was blind.I had already taken my place at the podium when she arrived with her cane and a huge sadness in her eyes. My kind companion placed her right in front of me.I smiled at her instinctively, I think that smiles are perceived without needing to be seen. I thought I saw the hint of one on her face.Just before the session began, I heard she said to the person next to her that she was cold.I remembered that I had a green shawl in my purse, so I proceeded to take it out and offer it to her.She took it gratefully and wrapped herself in it.The exposition on grief began.I have been a volunteer for almost seven years at a support centre for people wh...

leer en españolThat afternoon I went for a walk with a crowd.Ninety-three people, to be exact, including me.We sat in silence to contemplate the landscape.A little acrobatic bird, the first golden leaves of autumn playing with the breeze, the light throwing handfuls of diamonds into the river, ducklings playing in the current before the fixed gaze of mother duck, a yellow rose stranded in the algae.Sudden discoveries.I closed the book, the haikus anthology 2024, in which, surprisingly, my name appears. The remaining ninety-two are my fellow poets who gave me multiple and sudden sighs of astonishment that afternoon.Each of their poems, in their seventeen syllables, awakened a reverie that otherwise would go unnoticed.Recently, a young friend of my son who was interested in poetry, asked me:...

leer en español       This past week I was the star of a musical, not exactly Broadway, but a musical, nonetheless. I have to confess that they are not my favorite genre, with few exceptions, like “The Sound of Music” and “Jesus Christ Superstar” which I can sing from beginning to end. Let's say that in general, I find something forced in the fact that the actors talk to each other singing, as if that were the most natural thing in the world. Until last week. Yes, I must say that I reconciled myself with musicals. I understood that this uncontrollable and overwhelming desire to speak by singing is totally authentic. It arises from a joy, from a happy place. It's all my sister's fault who came from Barcelona for a few days. It all came back, our childhood, youth, ho...

leer en español      They are an indetermination of the mood, a hesitation.Doubts.A perpetual hesitancy that has increased with age, hence this reflection.They say that “when in doubt, abstain”, but I think it would be more appropriate to say, “when in doubt, ask”, because doubt, without a doubt, despite the redundancy, is an instrument for finding certainties and the basic unit of true knowledge.I believe that, in these times of informational and misinformation noise, doubting is even healthy and the first step to exercise that forgotten muscle, good judgment.It is not that my current and senile doubts are existential or philosophical, like that methodical doubt of Descartes that led him to his famous cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). I no longer ask myself: Who am I?  It's a li...

leer en españolIt is not common to see a senior gentleman directing traffic on the park path where I usually walk every day.But there he was, stopping the bicycles, ordering the pedestrians to stop and divert their course.When it was the turn for my daughter, granddaughter, dog and I, to cross this kind of checkpoint, we could see that this good Samaritan was protecting a bright green caterpillar, which was trying to cross the road perpendicularly.Yes, that's Canada.We stopped to watch the little worm crawl slowly, for what seemed an infinite distance. Xenon’s paradox came to my mind, the one that says that, since you have to get halfway, and then halfway of the halfway, and so on ad infinitum, it is impossible to get anywhere in a finite time. Something like that.My daughter decided to he...