Two irrelevant ideas

or are they? I recently experienced a situation where people were at odds with each other. Not unusual, I guess, on Earth... but this time they really loved one another... and yet didn't want to be with the each other. It was sad. Life is so short and when we can't let go of our "positions" long enough to be with someone we love... that is even sadder.

And then there is my girl friend from 50 years ago who stopped being my Facebook friend because she suspected I had become a Republican. My claims to being a libertarian must have just made things worse. If I was only friends with libertarians I'd be spending all my time infront of a mirror. So I didn't look her up after traveling 2000 miles to where she lives (no, that wasn't the reason for my trip).

And then death roars its ugly head... not once, but five times in four weeks. And with my contemporaries. When we die, we are reduced to a few grains of sand. How can that be? The priest said the other evening that when we are born our minds are blank, and then when we die we return to that state. The next day he said that when we sit zazen, we are facing death. I did not understand that when he said it, but tonight, sitting, I realized that when we focus on our breath we return to that state where there is no garbage in our noodle... and then we notice when she (the garbage) raises her ugly head, and we smile, and thank her for coming, and tell her she can leave now by the same door she entered.

He asked if I have time to mourn. I said yes, logically finding no reason why I didn't have time. But I really felt uneasy saying yes, because maybe I wasn't ready to mourn. I mentioned that my mom would say that when we mourn, we mourn our own death. Maybe, "do you have time to mourn" meant "do you have mourning time" or "are you going to allow yourself to mourn." We have time for lots of things that we don't do. Don't we?