So, this is what it amounts to

May 25, 2024

I wish you a happy Memorial Day holiday on Monday.
Memorial Day began around the time of the US Civil War and traditionally has focused on remembering fallen military members. With utmost respect for those soldiers, I have always been drawn to expand my remembrance on Memorial Day to include all my ancestors.

In China, Qingming, or Tomb-Sweeping Day, occurs fifteen days after the spring equinox, and families visit gravesites of their ancestors to clean the site, bring food and flowers, celebrate, and pray. I’ve always loved this ritual, though I have not been part of it. I have Chinese friends who still do this.

I confess to not being as diligent or consistent in my remembrance of those who came before me. Perhaps that is my shortcoming or the nature of our modern lives or a bit of both.

When we teach the module on history and lineage in the Zen Peacemaker Order, to be sure we address the eighty-some-odd generations of ancestors reaching back 2,500 years through the US, Japan, China, to India, our spiritual bloodline as represented in our kechimyaku. We also acknowledge family ancestry, our physical bloodline. But the most creative aspect of this exercise is when we consider our personal bloodline including those people, places, movements and events that irreversibly shaped us. Making such a list is fun and revealing. Mine includes Gary Snyder, Mount Rainier, The Beatles, my first girlfriend, and Joan Didion, among a couple dozen others.

When I turn and look behind me, in ten generations of blood ancestors, over 1,000 people contributed to my being here at this moment. Isn’t that remarkable? Two, four, eight, sixteen, and so forth. And I only knew five of them. Their energy, their love, and their life force got me here. They had no idea this hippie anarchist would be the fruit of their lives and labors, and had they known, they may have taken steps to prevent me. I want to thank and honor all of them for sparing me.

At the end of Case 75 in the Hekiganroku, Ukyu said, “So this is what it amounts to.” Indeed. Here I am.

This rear view of lineage and ancestry–perhaps best visually represented by an ever-widening conical shape, enlarging and expanding into the past with geometrically increasing numbers of greater and greater Grannies and Popos—is half the story, isn’t it? Does this “cone” go the other way?

As parents, this is easier to see. I have three kids and three grands. With luck, good health, climate change reversal, and peace, there will be a future ancestry, with some future hippie anarchist wondering who the hell I might have been.

But for all of us, parents and not, as with my personal ancestry list that includes Howard Zinn, Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi, and Ursula LeGuin, who might we influence out there in the future cone? What am I doing right now that might be regarded in 100 years as inspiration by some future earthling, or ignominious such that I have become a cautionary tale? Or me forgotten altogether. Forgotten is fine with me. My point is not to encourage fame. But just walking the earth, as Sam Jackson said, we cannot avoid becoming the warp or the weft of this life, weaving our words, actions, ideas, and presence into the human waistcoat.

Taken seriously, this can all feel like an enormous responsibility. And if we give the string theorists some purchase on the topic, we might be left pondering if indeed time flows from behind us off into some future horizon, or the other way ‘round, or all directions all the time.

Borrowing from my friend Eve, I suggest holding all this much more lightly, with an open hand.

This is what it amounts to. All that’s left for me is to do my best.

Happy Memorial Day. May your life go well.