This morning I woke up with the thought that a memorial is coming around later this month. Cynthia Taberner lived for decades with a debilitating, painful chronic illness and finally died from pancreatic cancer in her early 60s. She wanted to live! She loved her life, was grateful for every minute, and wanted it to go on and on.

What I cherish most from my memories of her, what she taught me, was how, Zen teacher that she was, she never let either her deep practice nor the horrors of the illness undermine the sharp meaning of everyday moments. That’s easy to do when you are in a great deal of pain and practicing diligently to find God. You want to back away from it all, leave behind the pangs and toils, find comfort in the bigness of spirit. Ah yes, the bigness of spirit.

When we invoke that too much, we risk leaving love behind. Sometimes we say that there’s small love (for the things of the world) and big love (for God). Buddhists like to talk of the small self and the big self. Those distinctions don’t speak to me. Life and love, in any measure, become more and more synonymous every day.

I recently read a great novel, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt, by English author Ben Reeves. Yes, the title is from Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. The narrator is no one other than the Angel of Death, in the shape of a nondescript man in his 30s called Travis, who goes from person to person and gives each the final touch that ends their life. He’s kind, hangs out with them at times, makes them a cup of tea, and does his job.

How? How can he witness so much death, hear so many people plead for their life, for a little bit more time, and still do what he does? “I wander,” is his reply. He adores this earth, opens his eyes wide where others shut theirs, but doesn’t engage, doesn’t get tied down or involved.

He’s lonely, but he sees the incredible beauty of things, even as he bears witness to a blood-soaked steering wheel and the young man bent over it, dying from an accident, or mayflies dying after just one day of life (they don’t have mouths because, given their lifespan, they don’t need to eat).

I went outside to write and noticed the bare branches of a maple under the big oaks. Funny, I thought, because I remembered it as full of leaves. I hadn’t noticed the difference when the leaves were all summer green, but now some are changing color and I can’t miss how skimpy those branches have become, all due to those taller trees, the “billionaire” trees that stuff themselves full of sunlight, creating more shade as the years go by, narrowing the variety of flowers that can grow here. No roses, no dahlias, skimpier maples.

I can cut trees down, but it costs money and I love trees. Let the next folks who will live here do that if they wish, I think. Let them renovate the kitchen, paint the house both inside and out, put in heat pumps. So many things need doing and I don’t do them because of the time, the energy, and the love lost.

The love lost? It’s all of it, including the thinning branches of a maple that can’t compete for growth with the billionaire oak looming above it.

All of it—families watching television together in the evenings, a birthday party for a 90-year-old woman, the slip that breaks one’s hip, even the back spasms that surprised me several days ago—is gorgeous to the eyes of the uninvolved observer, like seeing a dimly-painted Rembrandt and observing the wrinkles and scars on certain faces (including the artist’s), sitting back and saying: “Magnificent.”

Life and love finally draw in Death, or Travis, as he calls himself. These are the words he speaks to a woman who wants to commit suicide after the death of daughter: “People amaze me. All of you. Every single one of you amazes me. The things you’re capable of. The pain you’re capable of enduring. I have witnessed moments that perplex me, moments I would have thought impossible. You are resilient. Adaptable. Capable of so much love, it astounds me. I would give anything to feel what you feel.”

“Then what do you feel? Nothing?”

“I don’t know. I feel a great many things. Maybe everything. But that, in itself, is a kind of numbness. I’d like to be smaller. I would die for that.”

I would like to be smaller, too, because often the bigness of spirit, invoking God, the universe, the One Body, takes me away from the pathos and unfolding of small things. Jimena, my interlocutor with the immigrant community, needed almost $750 to pay for drivers’ education for migrants to get licenses, and over $1,000 for an electricity bill of a family where father and son were recently deported. When I hear about those things I mutter to myself that not even Death could find something beautiful about the mother and three young children left behind, it all feels so solid and heartbreaking.

But nothing is solid, as quantum physics has shown. The wife broke, the family broke, the heart broke, but other things came together. Families and community came together. Readers of this blog donate money to help even though you don’t know that family. My job has been to describe the situation as best I can so that you can envisage the tears coming down a mother’s cheeks and the questioning, scared eyes of the children.

Nothing is solid, response is everywhere. It’s what makes transformation possible.

But be careful about saying: I am everything. You are not anything, just the sum of what runs through you in every moment. Be careful lest you make life abstract, lest you let it take you off the hook, as it took Death off the hook for so much of the book.

Forget mindfulness for a minute. There is love when I notice the whitening hairs on Aussie’s back. But there is also love as I vacuum the car seats to remove those same hairs, as I shovel away piles of rabbit turd from the mowed grass, as I write a check to the company that worked on our driveway, as I empty out the paper recyclables that includes their bill, as I wrangle with an uncooperative television screen, as I shake away the flies and check for late-generation ticks in October. As I watch the night come earlier and make an Italian coffee for a student. Yes, even as the back is probed by a doctor and I yell out, because even care carries risk.

The wonderful poet Jane Hirschfield, in a recent conversation on the Zen Peacemakers website (you could access it very soon in their Media Library), reminded us that we take care of what we love. I choose to think that life takes care of life because life loves life.

The last donation I gave Jimena emptied out the immigrant account, so please consider donating to that using the button below.

In the very last page of Reeves’ book, Death speaks to the reader, who was me several nights ago, lying in a warm, lonely bed, windows shut against the cold, ears attuned to the silence around me:

“Imagine for one moment that you’re in the future. Your future. These are your last moments before death. You’re in your own bed, surrounded by flowers and cards and people you love. And there, in the corner of the room, like a shadow, is where you finally meet me. Now, imagine I give you a final gift. You’re allowed to go back. Just for 20 minutes, you’re allowed to go back to the exact moment where you’re reading these words—you’re back. Here you are.

This is your 20 minute gift. Do not waste it. You can’t change your life in 20 minutes, so don’t try. No—do the thing that you’ll wish, on your deathbed, you could have done one last time. Something precious. Kiss your partner. Play with your children. Wander in the world.

You have 19 minutes remaining.”