Small sound bath Thursday night, eight people, mostly regulars. Near the end I struck the big crystal bowl, the low F, and let it ring out like always.
Except it didn't fade. It kept going, a thin thread of sound, maybe twenty seconds longer than it physically should have. My hands were in my lap. Nobody touched it.
Afterwards a woman who'd come for the first time told me, very quietly, that it was her late father's birthday, and that he used to hum one low note to her when she couldn't sleep. 'Like that one,' she said.
I'm not going to make claims about what happened. I just held her hands for a minute, and then we had tea.
The patient who wanted to hear the rain
Details changed, as always, for someone who can't speak for himself anymore.
A few weeks ago I cared for a retired fisherman in his last days. He wasn't talking much by then. Mostly he slept, and when he woke he'd look toward the window. His daughter told me he'd spent his whole life listening to weather, reading it from the deck, and now the room was sealed and quiet and climate controlled.
So we opened the window. Just a crack. It was raining, the soft kind that barely makes a sound, and the sound filled the room anyway. His breathing changed. His hand, which had been clenched on the blanket for two days, opened.
I've been a hospice nurse for nine years and a Zen student for longer, and I still catch myself wanting to fix things. Adjust the pillow, check the line, find one more task. That afternoon there was nothing to fix. There was only rain, an old man, his daughter and me, sitting together while the weather did what it had always done.
He died that night, with the window still open.
Dogen says to study the self is to forget the self. I think I understood it a little better in that room than in years on the cushion. Nobody needed me to be anything. I just needed to be there, and to let the rain in.