Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Outside religious spaces, posing the big questions—how we arrived here; what we’re supposed to do with the time we’ve been allotted—is generally considered the terrain of undergraduate philosophy majors and people who have gravely misjudged their tolerance for edibles. Western culture has tidied and sanitized the moments (childbirth, death) that truly force the inquiry. In the delivery room, a mother might only be granted a dazed hour to cradle her newborn before everyone is cleaned up and wheeled off. Death is medicalized; the deepest mourning happens mostly in private. Yet once you become awake to the puzzle of existence, via loss or its opposite, it can be extremely difficult to think about anything else.’ (from the New Yorker)

I am glad that I have spent these last two decades in religious spaces, then, as I don’t know why else we would be alive, if not to contemplate what it means to be human.