The Moment
A speech for the Annual Laguna Honda Hospital Volunteers Luncheon,
San Francisco, April 24, 1996
You may be curious: what on earth is the Zen connection here anyway?
Isn't that a weird cult, or some flaky Marin thing?
In fact, the volunteers of the Zen Hospice Project are carrying
on a tradition that is twenty-five centuries old. Some hospice
volunteers would be quick to call them-selves "Buddhists," and
some would not. It doesn't matter. What does matter is that these
people have undergone a rigorous training that combines the practical
aspects of caring for the terminally ill with a philosophical
emphasis on opening the heart to the fullness of life. Like all
things complex and esoteric, the Zen idea is really quite simple:
by discovering the truth of the moment, we discover our compassion,
and by discovering our compassion, we discover the truth of the
moment.
The great curse of modern life, and especially modern urban life,
is that there is just too much to do. We're cunning, though --
by devoting most of our conscious-ness to logistics, we manage
somehow to fit in all the work and play and driving and parking
and shopping and studying and everything else. This comes at a
terrible spiritual cost, however: the eyes of the mind are always
fixed on the future -- an hour away, or a day, or a year -- and
so we often overlook the reality of this moment, which is, of
course, the only reality.
Once a week voluteers set aside their busy lives, typical Bay
Area lives full of stress and fun and chores and too much of everything,
and we come to Laguna Honda to do: whatever. There's no fixed
agenda, no goal, nothing that would constitute success or failure.
We simply try to be attentive to the moment, and of course, as
every Laguna Honda volunteer knows so very well, the moment always
directs our next move, whether it's emptying a urinal or listening
patiently or playing a tune on the dulcimer. No matter how harried
the day has been, no matter how damned inconvenient it is to set
aside the time for Laguna Honda, once we're here we're freed from
the awful burden of continually scheming what to next, and what
next after that, and so on. Instead, we can abandon ourselves
to simply being present -- often useful, always attentive.
It's a wonderful irony that, in the presence of dying people,
we become more intensely aware of the moment-to-moment miracle
of being alive. And in the stillness of this awareness, the heart
fills with love.
© Michael Fleming
Berkeley, California
April, 1996
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