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February 17th, 2022

John Dorner • Feb 17, 2022

A friend sent me a lovely piece of writing by Sarah Blondin in which she describes part of a song that the Buddhist master, Thich Nhat Hanh would sing to the dying to bring them comfort. The first lines of the song go like this: "This body is not mine. I am not caught in this body. I am a life without limits. I was never born; I have never died." Today, I've enjoyed singing that to myself.


You and I are always dying and being reborn in each moment. Everything, is, in each moment, dying and being reborn continually. Thay (as many called him) says (in this video) that when someone asks you, "What happens after I die?," the best response is, "What is happening right now?" It's the same, always.

There is a palpable sense of things dying right now, and it's more difficult to remember the other side - that the new world is being born, right now. Along these lines, the 15th Century Indian Mystic, Kabir wrote one of my all-time favorite poems. ("conscious and unconscious" can easily be replaced by "birthing/dying"):

Between the conscious and the unconscious, the mind has put up a swing:

all earth creatures, even the supernovas, sway between these two trees,
and it never winds down.

Angels, animals, humans, insects by the million, also the wheeling sun and moon;
ages go by, and it goes on.

Everything is swinging: heaven, earth, water, fire,
and the secret one slowly growing a body.
Kabir saw that for fifteen seconds, and it made him a servant for life.

~~Kabir (Translated by Robert Bly

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