Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘When my parents died, I’m an only child, so I inherited their house that was filled with their stuff. And they were both born in 1914, so they were Depression era children.

And they saved everything. They were very, very frugal. They weren’t hoarders. They weren’t messy. They were just very frugal. And so every piece of plastic wrap or aluminum foil had to be washed and hung to dry and then folded and then reused.

When I was cleaning out their house, these are the kinds of things that I found. And it was very hard to throw them away because somehow my parents, their care was still imbued in the objects. And my mother was Japanese. There were a lot of things that she had that I grew up with and they were still there in the house, some of which I understood, some of which I didn’t…

One of the things that I found was this little cardboard box, nothing special, and there was nothing in it. It was an empty box. And on the outside of the box, she had written in English, empty box, and then in Japanese, karabako, which means “empty box” in Japanese. So just to make sure that everyone knew that this was an empty box.

And so I found this thing. And I was thinking, what am I going to do with it? I mean, I can’t throw it away because it’s my mom’s and it was obviously important enough to her to label it carefully, right? But I can’t put anything into it because by putting something into it, I would turn it into exactly what it wasn’t. And so it was a kind of a conundrum. And so I just put it on my Buddhist altar because it seemed to me that was the perfect place for it.’ (from the New York Times)