Will We Leave Singing?

This is a transition day for me, usually bigger than New Year’s. The summer ends today and the school year begins tomorrow. So I’m in a reflective mood about the past year, the next year, and how swiftly this is all going.

Like some people do on New Year’s, I usually cook up a couple-three focus areas for the year – without contrivance, it just seems to be the way I do life. Last year at this time I had a heap of work with getting

Keep Me In Your Heart Awhile finished and also went back to graduate school. Now that the book is done and my grad school program is completed, I’m putting Zen practice/teaching back at the top of my priorities along with some personal-life stuff.

And, by the way, dear reader, I’ll begin soon setting up some traveling for 2009 to talk about the book so if you would like me to visit your local Zen center or church or what-have-you and give a talk or lead a sesshin or what-not, let me know.

Anyway, what’s on my mind more than promoting the book is aging and how little time there really is left.

A couple things have provoked this melancholy. I was up in northern Minnesota for my mother’s birthday yesterday. She is doing pretty darn well, as we say up there, although my dad, pushing 80, has some nagging issues and pains that seem to be getting to him more than he’ll admit (also like we do up there).

Meanwhile, I spoke on the phone with a good friend with cancer a couple days back who is recovering from recent surgery. An unexpected side effect is that they messed up the way that air passes over the vocal cords so he is still whispering several weeks after the surgery. They may be able to fix this shortly … but there are no guarantees.

Anyway, in terms of leaving this camp site singing, we may not even get out of this with our voices.