Sacramento, California
Saturday after Ash Wednesday
Today awareness brought a gift I couldn’t ignore. It was an ashes on the forehead, “Remember … to dust you will return” gift.
We spent the day with old friends in a “Celebration of Life” service for a strong, sassy friend who died suddenly. We did a great job celebrating her powerfully lived life. The hard part, the gift part, was to be aware of her absence. To be in the present moment and observe without judgment or evaluation, that Carolynne Akiko Murphy was dead. That simple fact is so painful, evokes so deep a fear, that we wish for anything but awareness.
When Tibetan Buddhism was opening to the west in the 1950s, an abbott sent a young monk to study at Cambridge. When the young monk returned after two years of study the old abbot summoned him and asked “Tell me what is the most important difference between the East and the West?” The young monk replied without hesitation “In the West, no one believes that they will die.”
Inseparable from our loss was the delight of being present with true friends, seeing the sparkle in their eyes, hearing the raucous laughter, feeling the embrace and tasting the wine poured in friendship and in acknowledgement of our common humanity and, by implication, our common primal fault.
Stars, I Have Seen Them Fall
Stars,I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.
The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault;
It rains into the sea,
And still the sea is salt.
A.E. Houseman, 1936