Hospice for a Dying World

夢

As I sit with my 88-yr-old Mother in New Haven, CT, in the skilled nursing facility we recently moved her to, the dreamlike quality of this so-called “waking” life reveals itself.

In the time before his death, Japanese Zen Master Takuan Soho’s students asked him for a death verse. At first he was reluctant. But in one moment, he took up his brush and drew the kanji character for “dream”:

夢

Then he passed.

As we sit with a dying world, it may be useful to explore our collective impermanence. Doing so may open up enough space in our awareness that we easily let go of what is leaving, (mercy to the old forms!) so we can stay in appropriate action without any irritable insistence on things going a particular way. And so that we may remain as midwives to this current, immortal, present moment.