Happy Father's Day!

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY TO ALL OF YOU LOVING AND HARDWORKING FATHERS!!

Thanks so much to all you dads out there who have done what needs to be done, played the silly games with us, and gave us kisses even if it didn't seem the manly man thing to do.

I dedicate this message of love and gratitude to my own father, Henry Mortara, and to my son, Ian (pictured with his own son, Austin). Ian, you are an AWSOME DAD!!

The Size of Life and Death

"She thinks of how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in our gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest." From: "The Hours" by Michael Cunningham (1998)

I remember standing at the side of my father's coffin, looking down at him, and wondering when he became so small. I think I always carried the child's-eye view of him with me -- the one that remembered the bigness of him. Yet there, in that box, I realized, for the first time, how little space he truly occupied. What was so large, almost larger than life, was, indeed, the aliveness of him.

Now that I am working in hospice I see this again and again. The body comes down to very little. I few feet long, a few feet wide. I have garden beds that occupy more space. Yet, I can always sense that there is this enormous aliveness no matter what level of consciousness the person before me may currently be in. Each person's life is vast but our bodies are really so very small. When death comes where does that vastness go? Into the memories of those we leave behind? And, over time, as those memories fade, what, then, is the true size of our life?

Born Enlightened

As I have been taught, we are all born enlightened and then begin the process of forgetting that this is our true nature. We experience suffering early because, as the first Noble Truth states, life is suffering. The mind interprets our suffering as indicating a failure somewhere in our universe and we start to label ourselves negatively. Thus the layers of greed, anger, frustration, delusion begin to cover our True Nature.

Our True Nature is what we see right here in this exquisite photo. I believe that somewhere, sometime during everyone's journey here on Earth School we all have moments where we reach out and become our fully enlightened Baby Buddhas and we begin to peel those layers back to our sweet, soft, innocent and divine essence. Pat your belly, laugh with pure joy, wiggle your toes in the grass. Remember....

(Photo courtesy of Great Vow Zen Monastery)