Phew! Its just an hour before the Funeral. This is what I have to say. You are the first to listen.

While we carry with us a diversity; of backgrounds, memories, living conditions, life conditions, it’s now our time to allow them to fall into the background of our consciousness. To allow ourselves to know in the depths of ourselves that Time, Space and Form lose their ordinary everyday meaning.  That truth will articulate in your own religious or non-religious affiliations. It is up to each of us to plumb the depths; no teacher, master or guide, or spiritual friend can do that for us.

Let us not pity or grieve or imagine a loss or pine for the past, or worry about the hole in our lives that a loss brings, or indeed have ideas about what happens when the life goes out of us or the life goes out of our nearest and dearest.

At death as in life fundamentally we go on alone AND, big AND, we have the hearts – minds -and hands of those near and far. Not as a crutch, not at all, more that, the heats, minds and hands are that which give us wings to set us free.

Retaining a sense of humour
Is the saving grace
of the religious life

The Funeral for Rev. Saido is at 9.30 AM 18th March.

We have snow tonight
All is still and bright
Some mellow sadness.

Seeing the stupa
What remains
After cremation?

Brilliant light
Where remains
Saido in the stupa.

It was Rev. Saido’s wish to have his cremated remains interred within the stupa he constructed relatively recently. There are already ashes of two lay sangha members in there.

The ‘how’ and the ‘when’ details will appear here, when I know.