Before we begin,
Or actually,
The Dharma Talk will begin,
I've asked Mackenzie to read something from the Five Invitations.
The page number is 219.
So if you have the book,
Page 219,
Mackenzie will start us off with the Dharma Talk.
I know a brave man named Julio.
Julio is a nursing assistant in a major metropolitan hospital whose job it is to clean up the emergency room.
After the pandemonium of a code during which the medical team has tried and failed to resuscitate a trauma patient in cardiac arrest with shock paddles and chest compressions,
The adrenaline stops pumping and the team walks away.
This is when Julio enters the room.
There he finds the patient lying motionless on the stretcher,
Dressed in nothing but a hospital gown.
An intubation tube awkwardly protrudes from the body's mouth.
The floor is speckled with puddles of blood and the gauze pads thrown aside during the procedure.
The red crash cart drawers dangle open like a mechanic's neglected toolbox in an auto shop.
The room still hums with residual activity.
The walls seem to hold the lingering voices of the emergency room team shouting their instructions and reports just minutes before.
Julio enters silently.
He spends a moment taking in the chaos,
Letting his eyes and ears move over the room,
Establishing what needs to be done.
Then his gaze falls gracefully on the now dead patient,
Whose name he does not know.
He approaches,
Leans over respectfully as if bowing to the person's nobility,
And whispers softly in the ear.
You have died.
It's okay now.
I will do my best to wash away all the dust and confusion.
Once Julio has straightened up the room,
Closed the crash cart drawers,
Picked up the blood-stained gauze,
And mopped the floor,
He washes his hands.
Then he begins to bathe the patient.
A recently hired nursing supervisor sticks her head in the door.
We need the room as soon as possible,
She barks.
Julio pays her no mind.
Others on staff at the hospital know of and respect his work.
They will protect this sacred moment.
Julio takes the time he needs to honor the dead.
Thank you.
Julio takes the time he needs to honor the dead.
It was the poet Rilke who once wrote,
Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us.
Mostly they are passed on unopened.
Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us.
Mostly they are passed unopened.
And I had Mackenzie start with that story because it really illustrates this poem and this invitation.
Today's invitation is very simple.
Find a place to rest in the middle of things.
Find a place to rest.
Not after the chaos settles or when conditions are better.
Not when life finally slows down.
But right here in the middle of life.
Every day,
Find a place to rest.
Such an important invitation.
I once heard a story about a practitioner who was diagnosed with cancer.
And I've shared this story before.
She was still very young and it was a serious diagnosis.
And her daughter was only two years old at the time.
And she didn't know if she would live long enough to see her daughter grow up.
And she survived.
But afterwards,
When she talked about it,
She said something that really stuck with me.
She said she wouldn't have traded the experience,
The cancer,
For anything.
She called it a gift.
Not because of the illness,
But because it showed her what mattered most.
What really mattered.
Tying with the people that she loved.
Being present and not rushing through her life.
And before she was diagnosed,
She was speedy,
Like most of us.
Going from the one thing to the next thing,
To the appointment,
To the gotta get the PT,
To the going to the doctor,
To the going to the school to pick up the kid.
Whatever it is,
Right?
We're moving around.
Like there's not enough time.
But afterwards,
She came up with a mantra that I've taken on as a mantra for myself.
And that mantra is,
I have no time to rush.
I have no time to rush.
And that phrase feels especially true in the culture that we live in.
America is one of the most speed-driven cultures that has ever existed.
We,
You know,
Move from one thing to the next while answering emails and texting.
Making plans and solving problems.
Trying to stay ahead of the next thing.
We fill our lives up with so much busyness.
But what has happened is that in some ways busyness has become an escape from actually living our life.
We're always so busy.
We're not actually living our life.
And that can happen with aging in particular.
I talked to some of my aging friends.
And their life is filled with kind of what Betsy pointed out earlier.
Staying on top of all of the appointments and being your own medical advocate.
To make sure you get all the tests and all the things.
So your busyness is wrapped up with your staying alive.
Staying alive for what?
Think about what sometimes happens when a person asks you,
How are you doing?
And your response to that question is,
I'm busy.
The conversation stops right there.
You might as well just slam the door.
Because when we say we're busy,
There is no more room to talk.
I'm busy.
Gotta go.
No room to connect.
No room for any sort of reflection.
No room to feel even what is happening inside of ourselves.
We just jump right back on the treadmill.
I had dinner with a friend the other night and she is so busy.
So busy.
Has so much going on.
Three kids.
She's getting texts all the time.
We're having dinner.
She has to leave the dinner table to go and take a call from her daughter who is worried about her ACT test scores to get into Vanderbilt.
All this stress.
And when I finally got her to rest over dinner,
We sat and I just kind of watched the whole scene.
I was like,
So,
Do you sit?
Are you sitting anymore?
And she took a breath.
And she said,
Every time I sit,
I just cry.
And then she started to cry.
And I was like,
Oh.
Oh,
That's beautiful.
You should do this.
Maybe you should do this.
Let's do this right now.
Let's just sit right now.
And so she sat and I sat with her.
And she cried and she sat.
And then five minutes later,
She felt a little better.
All that busyness keeps us separated from ourselves.
She couldn't even feel.
Afraid to feel.
Because the busyness,
You can just keep going.
You don't have to feel anything.
I know folks in this group that stay really busy.
And they don't have to feel anything.
And I'm just hopeful that some of this Dharma lands.
Sticks.
So how do we step off the treadmill of busyness?
How do we interrupt the movement toward our inevitable end?
Not in a dramatic way.
It doesn't have to be dramatic.
And all it is,
Is what I asked my friend to do in that moment.
Well,
Let's just stop right now.
Let's just stop right now.
Right now.
On a bench in Carbondale.
After dinner.
With a little bit of rain.
And so we sat.
In the sprinkles.
All we have to do is add moments of pausing.
Moments of resting.
And something really surprising happens when we do this.
Life doesn't become smaller.
It becomes larger.
When we pause,
We experience more minutes in our life.
Not fewer.
And time becomes fuller and not faster.
Fuller.
So finding a place to rest in the middle of things.
This invitation.
Right here.
Right now.
In this moment.
Is the only place that we can rest.
Right now.
Right here.
In this moment.
Not in a future moment.
Not in a past moment.
Only here.
And sometimes that rest is really short.
Sometimes,
For me,
Sometimes it's like before entering the church,
I just take a minute in my car.
Just to like take a breath and like,
Okay.
Transitioning now from family life and taking the dogs for a walk and emptying the dishwasher to coming in and offering Dharma.
Okay.
Transitions are actually great moments to rest.
And just even saying,
Now here I am.
I'm here now.
I'm here now.
This is where I'm at now.
Or like when you pull into your driveway or your garage.
You get your groceries in the back after going out to get your groceries.
Turn off the car.
Turn off the radio.
Just take a minute.
Okay.
Transitioning now.
Either going into an empty house or I'm going into a house where there's people and dogs and chaos and busyness.
Let me just rest here for just a second.
Just a minute.
That's enough.
It does create a fullness in life.
Not a limitation.
No time to rush.
And this isn't just in the Buddhist tradition.
That I'm offering this resting.
It's in so many religious traditions,
Spiritual traditions.
In the Judeo-Christian stories.
The story in Genesis.
I love this story.
God speaks and the world begins.
Let there be light.
And the light appears.
And then water appears.
Light appears.
Water appears.
The earth,
The planets,
The animals.
Everything is created in this story through words.
But when the human being is created.
Something very different happens in this story.
God does not speak the human into existence.
Instead.
Let's go this way.
Let's go back.
I've got to turn this person off.
Let me just make sure that everyone is muted.
Sorry about that.
So God does not speak this human into existence.
What he does is he breathes into the human's nostrils.
Breathes in the breath of life into the human being.
There was a rabbi.
He's passed away.
And he was also a meditation teacher.
His name was Alan Lu.
And he was a friend of my father's.
He was my first Dharma teacher,
Norman Fisher.
In the Zen tradition.
And Rabbi Lu would say that.
That illustration in Genesis of God's breath into the human's nostrils.
That detail really,
Really matters.
He said that the breath is the most intimate connection that we have to the sacred.
The most intimate aspect we have with the sacred.
It's deeper than words.
It's deeper than thought.
It's deeper than form.
The breath.
Breath can't be understood intellectually.
It can only be experienced.
And the breath is always happening now.
Not yesterday.
Not tomorrow.
Only now.
And even if you have limitations in breathing,
It's still happening.
There is an intimacy with the sacred.
That is the breath.
So every time that we pause.
And we take a breath.
We're not doing something small.
We're remembering that we are alive.
That we are intimately connected to our aliveness.
To this planet.
At this time.
And this is a precious human life that we have been given.
That intimacy with the sacred is just always here.
It doesn't take much.
It takes a moment.
And maybe those moments go into minutes.
One minute becomes five minutes.
You find that resting is more important than racing.
It doesn't matter how long we stop.
What matters is that we stop.
We stop.
And the more you're racing,
The more important it is to stop.
Because when we rest,
Even if it's very brief.
Something softens in us and we can feel it immediately.
The rushing softens.
The fear softens.
The feeling that we're running out of time softens.
And in that moment,
We receive the gift that Rilke was talking about.
Love and death are the greatest gifts that are given to us.
Not in some distant future.
They're right here.
Right in the middle of our ordinary life.
I think that's why we come together.
To remember that.
That's why I do this,
I think,
To some degree.
To teach on the Dharma.
So I remember.
To stop.
To breathe.
To connect with the sacred.
To say,
You know,
Here,
I'm here now.
I'm here now.
And that's enough.
So I want to close this talk with a poem.
And then we'll have an inquiry.
The poem is written by Padraig Otuma.
It's called The Facts of Life.
That you were born and you will die.
That you will sometimes love enough and sometimes not.
That you will lie,
If only to yourself.
That you will get tired.
That you will learn most from the situations you did not choose.
That there will be some things that move you more than you can say.
That you will live.
That you must be loved.
That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of your attention.
That you will begin as the fusion of a spurt of energy.
A sperm and an egg of two people who were once strangers and may still well be.
That life isn't fair.
That life is sometimes good and sometimes even better than good.
That life is often not so good.
That life is real and if you can survive it well,
Survive it well with love and art and meaning,
Giving,
Where meaning's scarce.
That you will learn to live with regret.
That you will learn to live with respect.
That the structures that constrict you may not be permanently constricting.
That you will probably be okay.
That you must accept change before you die.
That you will die anyway.
So you might as well live and you might as well love.
You might as well love.
You might as well love.
That poem just gets me.
So the inquiry,
Let me get my glasses because I can't see as well as I used to.
The inquiry,
This is from Frank's discussion group that comes with the book.
He writes,
We can be addicted to being busy,
To multitasking and productivity.
We can be addicted to being busy,
To multitasking and productivity.
