On Dying
I thought about this line from the movie Barbie first thing in the morning:
I’m moving out of NYC in two days.
It feels like relief (mainly on my savings account but also psychologically and emotionally) and tender sweet grief all at once.
I feel light and happy walking in Manhattan in spring weather and nostalgic for urban romance — romance, as in fanciful inventions of my youthful imagination about living and working for myself in the city that never sleeps and memories of tortured love affairs that cost me sleep while I lived here.
Leaving the city, no longer calling it home, is a kind of dying. Dying of an identity as a New Yorker. Dying of an era.
Too dramatic? Too depressing?
Of course my life will continue as I live, laugh and love across the river in New Jersey.
A new life as a Newarker: a conceptual reincarnation?
When I get up before 5am, which I do occasionally, I go to Chogyesa, the Korean Zen temple on Central Park West. I sit in on the daily 6am bowing and meditation session with the monk in the dharma hall with golden Buddha statues.
When I’m a Newarker, the trip will be longer, so I’d have to get up before 4:30am, making it more difficult to make the trip to the temple and arrive by 6am.
That knowledge heightened the sense of appreciation and aliveness in me this morning. The gift of importance making me more attuned to the blue light of dawn, the quiet city streets, the birdsong… it was a beautiful morning.
The other week, ahead of Buddha’s birthday celebration, I paid the monk one hundred dollars for the privilege of getting a prayer tag dedicated to my late father.
Korean Buddhist prayer tags hang from colorful paper lotus lanterns in the main dharma room. Like this.
When I sit in meditation, I indulge in a bit of self-hypnosis, imagining the presence of my late father, gently smiling beside me (or more precisely in me), pleased by the ringing bell, the monk’s sonorous chanting, and the scent of burning incense.
His presence feels palpable, real, and peaceful.
Who knows?
Maybe there’s no such thing as dying.