Generations

City Center is more than a community in some ways; it can often feel like an extended family. Currently the age span of our residents runs from Lou, who just celebrated turning 95 last week, to P., who is still shy of his third birthday. I don't think we have any teenagers living here now, but we undoubtedly have representatives from every other decade of life.
There is a well-know zen story that goes: a rich merchant asked the master Sengai for an auspicious saying that would preserve the prosperity and happiness of his family. The master wrote a beautiful calligraphy that said 'Grandfather dies, father dies, son dies'. The merchant was not very happy with this, thinking it depressing rather than auspicious, but the master pointed that that it was a blessing to have the generations die in their natural order, rather than a parent having mourning a dead child.
We have had two moving talks which touched on death this week, first from Tova on Wednesday night, which combined the methods of bodhisattva practice with her work as a hospice social worker, and then the next morning a Way-Seeking Mind talk from one of our residents, still in her early twenties, which revolved around the recent death of her beloved father and how this brought her to practice.
As Blanche is quite fond of saying, death is certain, time of death is uncertain. In many ways we practice in order to come to terms with our own death, and the way to do that, according to the ancient teachers, is to understand fully what life is, to live as fully as we can in awareness of the transitory nature of our lives.
On the han, which calls us to zazen every day, we can read this verse:
Great is the matter of birth and death,
Life is fleeting, gone, gone,
Awake, awake each one,
Don't waste this life.