(Tricycle: The Buddhist Review)
The first time I really “got” meditation, I was standing at my kitchen sink washing dishes.
My father was dying. Cancer.
Hospice bed in the living room-style cancer.
I’d flown back to Nebraska to see him one last time, to hold his hand, say goodbye.
Now, the haunting question of when.
I was 26, living in a 100-year-old flat in San Francisco, bartending my way through grad school, subsisting on coffee and cocktails. Standing there at the sink, I could hear the young couple upstairs vacuuming, the Chinese family across the alley clattering pans, and the cable car clanging one block over on California Street.
My mind was obsessively circling the drain.