Good morning. This is really wired for sound. I'm not used to speaking on an amplified system. I would like to begin my talk this morning by saying a little bit about what is happening at the end of the day because it's related to what I'd like to talk about this morning. There has been a group of us from various religious traditions here in Marin County over the last year or so meeting and we have formed something we've been calling an interfaith spiritual support team for people with AIDS and their families and friends. And we have every couple of months been doing a service together

[01:01]

to which we invite people with AIDS and their families and friends. And this afternoon at 4 o'clock here in the Zendo we will be doing an interfaith service and we will conclude the service in the garden. We'll be doing some walking meditation in the garden and then we'll have tea and cookies. Since the fog is out and the sun is out it looks like we actually may be able to do all of that. So in the context of our having this service here this afternoon and also because of the circumstances of my own life these days I'd like to continue some of what I began talking about the last time I spoke. The good and cheery subject of dying and death. And I mean that actually quite seriously

[02:03]

because my experience is that the more any of us is willing to allow ourselves to experience the various dyings in our lives the more fully alive and awake our lives become. One of the questions that comes up for many of us and certainly comes up for me these days is a consideration of how I respond to the Declaration the statement of fact that someday I will die and that that is in fact true for each of us. And yet I think there's a way in which we don't quite believe it. We all have a tendency anyway to think that this is one of those things that's going to happen to somebody else. Somehow we'll be the great exception

[03:04]

or it'll happen sometime in the distant future. And of course one of the things that is happening for many of us and in particular for those of us who know people who have AIDS is that we are beginning to have more and more vivid experience of people dying earlier than we imagine is appropriate. Children, young adults, people who look to be in the prime of their life. And of course there has been this kind of dying always that unexpected, untimely, early dying. What I'd like to talk about a little bit this morning is to suggest something about how we can attend to the dying that happens in our daily lives in small ways

[04:08]

and to suggest that the more we can attend to these minor deaths the more we can be ready, we can be prepared welcome, if you will, our own and others' dying process when it comes and greet it with something other than resistance and fear. I read in the paper yesterday, I have this habit of reading the newspaper a month or two or a year after it was published. I find it a significantly easier way to read the news. I can skim past most of it. It does make my family a little crazy because there are these enormous stacks of old newspapers which no one can believe I really want to read but I do occasionally.

[05:10]

Anyway, yesterday I read about a young boy who was 19 or 20 who had been a great athlete when he was in high school a brilliant student, a young man with great promise who had always wanted to fly airplanes, wanted to be in the Air Force had been accepted to the Air Force Academy, was in his first semester and was playing tennis and had a heart attack and died much to the surprise of his family and friends. He had no history of a heart condition. It was completely unexpected. I feel like these days I keep hearing about these incidents where young children are killed by someone driving into or over them. Those kinds of deaths which come unexpectedly.

[06:16]

When something falls from the sky and that's it, you're finished. Remember the airplane accident, I guess it was last year in Southern California where that's literally what happened. So how do I contemplate my own dying or the dying of those close to me or the people whose stories I read in the newspaper and when I read them I feel some connection or tug some resonance as I read about this inevitable process. I keep thinking about the little deaths. This morning I was washing the dishes and one of the dishes I washed was a bowl that a friend of ours made

[07:23]

when my husband and I were married which has our names and the date of our wedding on it. Quite beautifully and lovingly made. A bowl that I enjoy using a lot and I've been waiting for the day when it would break because I know how much I enjoy using the bowl and there's that kind of flicker of anticipation. I hope I break it and not someone else. So this morning when I was washing the bowl there was a chip, the first chip. It started its process and I could feel a kind of twinge of regret and I caught myself. Isn't it inevitable that a bowl made out of clay and baked with heat

[08:24]

and filled with various things to eat and washed and piled up in the dish rack and cats jumping precariously over the dish rack and things being dropped into the sink full of dishes, etc. Isn't it inevitable that this bowl will break? Don't I know about the meditation that I've done many times with a teacup where as I'm holding the teacup filled with tea I know that the cup is already broken that I can enjoy holding the cup or this beautiful bowl this time while I'm using it or this morning while I'm washing it and when it's broken that's in the nature of the bowl. Bowls and cups are made and break and others are made. A kind of death when my daughter whom I love dearly and enjoy enormously

[09:31]

got in the car this morning to drive off into her life and I certainly felt a twinge as she went off down the driveway although she did it with great humor and speed. It only took her about three weeks to leave but when she left she did it rather quickly like when you rip a bandage off, do it fast. Excuse me. There's the dying which I see every day when I watch one of our old dogs who is seventeen and can barely walk. Some days can't walk at all. Sometimes gets down on his back and has to have someone else help him get up on all fours. Slowly dying before my eyes. A kind of dying that happens when a friend leaves angry

[10:39]

and there is that kind of closing down that happens out of misunderstanding or fear or mistrust that feels also like a dying. And right now the crab apple trees in front of the house where I live are losing their leaves going through their process which seems so right these days as the weather is turning. It's certainly fall. It's that time of turning in, closing down, getting ready for winter even in our own modulated way that is typical of California. Shakespeare talks about the coming of night as death's second self

[11:42]

that seals up all the rest. And if I'm sitting, doing zazen, doing meditation I may in following breath notice at the end of the exhalation a space before the next breath comes. And perhaps I can consider that space at the end of the exhalation as a kind of minor dying. Is it possible for me to allow that moment when there is no breath going out and no breath coming in when I have no idea what will be next just that moment of stillness, of conclusion that point in the cycle

[12:42]

and then the next breath comes in and out and again that space. So what I'm suggesting is that our ability to meet these inevitable experiences that are laced through the day and night of the impermanence of things if we meet and note and allow ourselves to touch fully these various episodes of change, of impermanence it is a way of being ready for that part of our living cycle that has to do with our dying so that we can meet it in ourselves and in others with some open-heartedness and not quite so much fear which is of course not to say that we may not have fear arising

[13:47]

but it won't be the only thing that arises it won't be the only emotion. We may be able to have a kind of presence which allows us to see that wonderful co-mingling of living and dying which is everywhere. I want to read a brief section from the journal of a young woman who is dying of leukemia. She talks, I think, very movingly about this co-mingling. Part of the dying process is that one's eyes get to the point where you don't know whether you need your glasses or you don't need your glasses or maybe you need both. This is from the journal of a 17-year-old girl

[14:49]

I didn't even know what it meant to be alive until they told me that I was going to die. At first it meant nothing to me, nothing at all. The word had only a strange hard ringing to it something about platelets and corpuscles and my mother crying holding the bedpost. She just stood there stunned holding the bedpost and my father's head was hanging. I just couldn't imagine not living not being there with them anymore. It took a lot of days for me to wonder about what it meant then to be really alive and how much I had lived in my 17 years. All of a sudden then like a summer rainstorm I wanted to live very much. I wanted to run on the streets and taste all the ice cream cones quickly before the summer ran out.

[15:52]

I wanted to hug my mother and shake my father out of his stupor. Things I'd never thought of before things I'd been afraid to do. How much of our living do we put off for later when we're going to be on vacation or when we retire or when we get our obligations finished. And so we put off our living. I'd also like to read a section from Suzuki Roshi's book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind which some of you may know It's a wonderful passage where he talks about the waterfall at Yosemite which he loved and had quite a response to. I think it's in a chapter which is called Nirvana and the Waterfall. Our life and death are the same thing

[16:58]

when we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore or actual difficulty in our life. I went to Yosemite National Park and I saw some waterfalls and the water did not come down as one stream but seemed to be separated into many tiny streams. So I thought it must be a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down from the top of such a high mountain. It takes a long time, you know for the water to finally reach the bottom of the fall and it seems that our human life may be like this. We have many difficult experiences in our life but at the same time the water was not originally separated it was one whole river. Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty in falling. After we're separated by birth

[18:01]

from this oneness as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks then we have feeling and pain. When you do not realize that you are one with the river with the universe you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not water is water. Our life and death are the same thing when we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore and we have no actual difficulty in our life. Kierkegaard says if we truly saw that death was imminent for all could we be anything but kind

[19:01]

loving full of compassion all of the time? I'd like to in closing read this section one sonnet from Shakespeare where he talks about death's second self the night that seals up all the rest so sonnet 74 Be contented when that fell arrest without all bail shall carry me away my life hath in this line some interest which for memorial still with thee shall stay when thou reviewest this thou dost review the very part was consecrate to thee

[20:02]

the earth can have but earth which is his due my spirit is thine the better part of me so then thou hast but lost the dregs of life the prey of worms my body being dead the coward conquest of a wretch's knife too base of thee to be remembered the worse worth is that is that which it contains and that is this and this with thee remains when I read this sonnet a few days ago what came up for me was remembering when Suzuki Roshi died and we sat with his body for some time before it was cremated and the ashes were subsequently buried and I remember being surprised

[21:07]

at the experience that I have had at the time in sitting with him there was a way in which so much of what I had experienced and understood about him and his life which was uninterrupted there was this corpse there was this conclusion of a certain way of being together of talking together of doing things but there was also a way in which his energy and life was clearly continuing all around us and to this day especially when I go to Tassajara and see the rocks he placed in making gardens and walls I can feel his energy and life still there or when I read some of this collection of his lectures

[22:09]

in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind or sit down cross-legged on my cushion and am reminded of him and his encouragement to continue sitting no matter what so what does it mean this dying and this living can we meet whatever is dying with some fuller bigger sense or bigger mind and allow ourselves not to be caught by our inclination to possess or hold on or control to trust the process ourselves and each other and as Kierkegaard says to be kind and loving and full of compassion all of the time thank you very much

[23:10]

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