Six weeks after my brother's death, the night came for Dad to die. The doctor came in telling us he could do nothing for him. And then, with a gasp, Dad took his last breath. The air was still and yet there was a Presence larger than life as Dad left his body. The Presence was palpable and real, yet unseen. I did not trust this, yet I knew it to be true. "It feels like a birth," my sisters said... Years later, I was sitting at my desk. Suddenly, I heard a voice, my father's voice. There was no one physically there. And yet, I heard my father speaking to me. "Bobby and I are together now. We are doing fine. We're with you more than you think."
We cannot control our life. If we are set upon doing so, we have abdicated from peace, which must balance what is desired with what is possible. As Hokusai shows so memorably, the great wave is in waiting for any boat. It is unpredictable, as uncontrollable now as it was at the dawn of time. Will the slender boats survive or will they be overwhelmed? The risk is a human constant; it has to be accepted — and laid aside. What we can do, we do. Beyond that, we endure, our endurance framed by a sense of what matters and what does not. The worst is not that we may be overwhelmed by disaster, but to fail to live by principle. Yet we are fallible, and so the real worst, the antithesis of peace, is to refuse to recognize failure and humbly begin again.