a radio was on.

My friend Robin says the in breath is the present, the out breath is the past.  I've struggled to find solace in Buddhism, perhaps a path, but it is hard for me to be comforted by impermanence, even as it crowds my vision in this late winter.  But what Robin says offers a path through our sorrows, both real and anticipated. Death has been no stranger of late; you know of what I speak, the grief caught in your throats. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd, And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever- returning spring. Walt Whitman writes here of death, the death of Abraham Lincoln, yoking mourning and spring, the time of the new, of rebirth, of planting.  Towards the end of the poem, he travels with death, companionably, something unlike Dante: "Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me/And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,/And in the middle as with companions.&

My friend Robin says the in breath is the present, the out breath is the past.  I've struggled to find solace in Buddhism, perhaps a path, but it is hard for me to be comforted by impermanence, even as it crowds my vision in this late winter.  But what Robin says offers a path through our sorrows, both real and anticipated. Death has been no stranger of late; you know of what I speak, the grief caught in your throats. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd, And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever- returning spring. Walt Whitman writes here of death, the death of Abraham Lincoln, yoking mourning and spring, the time of the new, of rebirth, of planting.  Towards the end of the poem, he travels with death, companionably, something unlike Dante: "Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me/And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,/And in the middle as with co