“And Yet”…from John Thomas

In the spirit of honoring Jeff’s life, and the grief that we may meet in facing his death, I would like to share a passage from the book “Upside-Down Zen,” by Susan Murphy (pages 40-41).  I think Jeff would have appreciated it.  John T.

Zen dares us never to push any part of life away.  John Tarrant once suggested that you may find the great gate of the Mahayana, the compassionate Middle Way, opening in just two tiny words of a haiku that the Zen poet Issa wrote upon the death of his beloved two-year-old daughter:

 The world of dew

is the world of dew – 

and yet

 The first two lines of the poem bow deeply to the orthodox Buddhist teaching of impermanence and non-attachment: we must accept our place in “the world of dew,” for all evanescent life is born in the morning and gone even before the afternoon – a fact strong enough to break human hearts.  But in a departure from orthodox Buddhism, the final line of the poem – the immensely tiny and powerful “and yet” – bows humbly and unreservedly to that ordinary breaking of human heart.  Issa doesn’t force a choice upon us.  He does not ask that we detach from our agony, grief, and longing but leaves us considering something far more challenging, something that transforms the notion of “clinging” from the inside out.

 “And yet,” he says, we have no choice if we are truly alive but to hold both love and grief together with the profound emptiness of all form in our own heart and bones.  If we can do that – with all the rigor and courage it undoubtedly requires – then we may deeply realize as the great fact of our sacred, mortal bodies that this limited human life and this boundless eternity are not two.  Are even less than one.  “This very place is the Lotus Land, this very body, the Buddha,” a famous Zen poem declares.  For the Zen path of practice runs right through the fertile ground of the great middle and nothing falls outside of that.

So when you are grieving, grieve just as if your life depends on it.  It does.  When you are grieving, lose your self in grief and let it open you beyond yourself into the immensity that is beyond the self and no-self 

Just sobbing.  Just laughing.  Not an inch off from your unrepeatable life.  And that is how to praise it.   

 

From Patrice Sauve

It is sad news to hear about Jeff's passing. It is also arising for me as a practice opportunity to accept what is, to accept the natural cycle of death and that it's not "bad."

 

Jeff truly was a remarkable human and spirit who touched so many of us deeply. The main picture you posted is so perfect of how I saw him--that nook in his San Fran place was one of his favorites. Even the clothes he's wearing are exactly "Jeff" in physical form.

 

I heard he seemed to shine more brightly in the final months. My deepest wish since I found out about his cancer was that he wouldn't suffer too much but would transcend that suffering through "being" his true nature of awareness. It sounds like his dying process was embraced with acceptance, noticing and allowing what is. And I'm sure, as a human, he experienced some resistance to it as well. It reminds me of one of my favorite messages from Nirmala, one of Jeff's most loved teachers, I hold so dear (there is no problem with any difficulty or even with the resistance to it. A big "yes" can be present to it all.) Jeff was a spiritual warrior who could really take this on and be a living example of it.

 

This was the nature of most of our conversations. We also spent many hours reminding each other and laughing about how we're not really "me." I'm sure as he was embracing the experience of death, he was reminded and comforted by knowing that he was not "Jeff," "me," the physical body, the personality, etc.

 

I'm tempted to feel sad that I didn't know about this when he passed or that I wasn't a part of his dying process. I know this is selfish and yet it's a natural human response for the type of relationship he and I had. I call on my understanding to accept it as it was/is. Though I was a significant part of his life experience for just a short period, this was apparently exactly as it was meant to be. Jeff and I discussed and expressed our sadness the last time we talked in the fall, 2008, that we couldn't continue to be as close as we were for various reasons.

 

It's funny that it all turned out exactly as it was meant to--as life does!!! It was my 50th birthday on Sat, Apr 18. To find out about Jeff's death on the 19th seemed to cap my weekend perfectly. It challenges me to recommit to being fully alive, to a rebirth of soulfulness and living from my true nature and to transcending my stuck/self-judging parts that have been present. Over the winter months, partly influenced by knowing Jeff was probably dying, I went in pretty deep into mortality issues. I grieved the end of my "youth," and felt anger, resentment and depression that I wasn't where I thought I'd be at 50. I felt hopeless about a bright future, that I'd better be more realistic than my idealistic first half of the century. In the midst of all this, I was always comforted by the non-dualistic principles and meditations that were the basis of Jeff's and my relationship. I intertwined these to heal my emotions and personality sorrows. In honor of his life and death, I'm reminded that I now carry the torch to have compassion for and heal that line of "sorrowful" thinking, come to peace with it and embrace the life I have as it is.

 

Thanks for your heartful listening to my writings.

 

Patrice Sauve (in Michigan)