"Zen Master and the Marble"

"Zen Master and the Marble"
*exerpt from "Spirits Ive known...and a few I didnt" by Duane Thomas 2009

While living in Miami many years ago, I met a Zen Master of considerable knowledge. Striking up a friendship was easy. He was a neighbor of sorts who was picking up an orange at the stand on the road. He smiled at me. "Pickin' a good one, huh!?" I said smiling back. "There are no bad ones" he said still smiling. "They are all only oranges". Thus began a brief apprenticeship with Chen So on the principle of Life, Death and Eternity.

Once, I asked him about Death and where we go when we die. With his ever present smile, Chen So reached into the drawer. Pulling out a regular cats eye marble, he motioned me outside. The marble gleamed with cracks and crevises in the hot Florida sun. Raising his arm, he threw the marble as hard as he could at the wall of the deck, where it shattered into a million little glass crystal-like pieces all over the ground. Chen So looked at me and the pieces of shattered glass and asked me "Now. Where did the marble go?" This was easy!" Gone! You broke it!" I laughed. "Into a million little pieces!". "Yes. Yes I did." he responded. "But the marble is STILL a marble as you said...only now in a different form. One in a million pieces perhaps....but still...a marble just as well!"

I understood. We're not there in the grave, or in ashes on a mantle...those are just shells discarded at the time of "going to the light'. Knowing this, I felt better. My loved ones and the loved ones of all of us, wait beside us in another dimension. One we cant see. Like a million little pieces of a broken crystal marble, they are still here! And that even though it doesnt look the same....it still is. Just in another form. And so goes Life into Death into LIfe into Death...and we are never, ever alone!

For those that leave us that we love dearly, never really leave us at all. Love transcends all things, places and time.

Stay well friends.....Duane

http://www. drivinsidewaysindetroit. blogspot. com/
duanethomas@johnnyandthhurricanes.com