Home, home again. I flew back to ATL this morning, arriving home around 1:30 pm. I didn't bother going into the office, instead spending the day replying to the accumulated business email and voice mail at home, grocery shopping (the place was foodless), and preparing to open the zendo for Monday Night Zazen.

I didn't prepare a dharma talk for tonight, preferring instead to talk spontaneously about the events of the weekend, my reactions and any dharma lessons that I could find in there. In preparing to open for the night, I was preparing my mind, not some notes.

I never did get a chance to talk about all those things, as it turned out. After the evening's sit, a sangha member confided that she's been struggling with many issues, including grief, as she had gotten the news over the weekend that her ex-husband had passed away.

An excellent conversation ensued. We talked about our sense of loss, we talked about being reminded of our own mortality, we talked about life and death as the great matter. I recounted Suzuki's comments about water going over a fall, and the comfort that I got from that. She talked about her direct realization of the emptiness of existence. We each found comfort in our common experience. We talked about Karl Jung and the collective unconscious.

Puzzling evidence, synchronicity, or spooky action?: it turns out that her ex-husband passed away in Honolulu, Queen's Hospital to be precise, the same remote (for Atlanta) city and hospital where my father passed away last February. Both men died several days following complications of the heart.

It's a strange world.