Is this amazing thing with death that there is both less of someone and yet more of them

that there's some way in which you can walk in the woods and they're there to speak to?

Being with death slows us down, it softens us.

It makes us more gracious.

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That's part of a traditional blessing chant that speaks to the deeds of our life for the moments of goodness

that like the streams in the rivers that carry the water from the clouds to the great oceans.

So may the goodness of our words or actions touch all other beings, those present and those departed.

And I begin with that chant because I'd like to continue the talk that we started two weeks ago when I was here about death.

My father, as many of you know, my father died this last week and I've just returned from his funeral and I'm now in the middle of the retreat,

at the beginning of the retreat at Santa Sabina where there's 60 or 70 more of us who are sitting in San Rafael at this beautiful retreat for three weeks.

And I speak tonight as a way also to speak to myself often when I sit up here to say things.

It's as much to say things so that I can hear them talk to myself.

As you recall, perhaps those of you who are here two weeks ago, in the teachings on awakening or mindfulness from the Buddhist tradition, particularly in the four foundations of mindfulness,

after one takes a seat and becomes aware of one's own breath and body, there's a whole preparation, a whole section of awakening that has to do with the reflection and awareness of our own death.

And death around us. And it's there to remind us of the preciousness of life, to have the life that we have, to have our health, to have time, to be able to practice, to have some sense of what it means to cultivate wakefulness or compassion, all our great treasures.

And so the Buddha said just as the elephant's footprint is the greatest of them all and within this can fit the footprint of every other animal.

So to awareness of death is the greatest of the mindfulness meditations because within it all other things can be understood.

And when one confronts this fact of death, we know that we'll die, absolutely certain. The only thing that's uncertain is the time.

Then the question is, well, what is death? Someone went to a Zen Master and asked him one day, what happens when you die? And he said, I don't know.

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