“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.