A clear summer afternoon, the long day settling into a violet twilight – I am sitting in the backyard of my daughter’s house – a gentle breeze rustles the leaves on two large trees shading the yard.  Closer to the house are a variety of children’s toys spread out, cars, trucks, plastic figures and a sandbox, filled with other toys; bright plastic pails and shovels, more cars and trucks, including an overly expensive model of a sports car that I had bought for the older boy – not meant to be a sand toy, but in its proper place at this moment.    

Birdsong in stereo all around us – children laughing as they clamber up a slide set in the next yard, their father chasing them with an exaggerated gallop.  This is summer, and there are happy families enjoying the magic time after an early dinner and before it gets truly dark and time for baths and bedtimes. 

I watch my two young grandchildren as they dash from toy to sandbox to another toy and occasionally glance at my daughter and wife sitting nearby, chatting about the gardens and what to plant next.  I close my eyes and pause to think about my own father and mother, perhaps because of the introspection inherent in this moment.  They are the ghosts that I barely knew and that my own children never met – their “grandparents” were the foster parents that I lived with through late childhood and adolescence and continued to see until their deaths.  

Those “real” grandparents are but three generations distant from these children running across the yard, two generations from my own children.  Yet, the time and distance seem vast; they would both be over a hundred years old, I was born in the early nineteen fifties, and my children in the nineteen eighties and nineties.  The generational connection is fragile, my parents but distant memories and images on faded black and white photographs.  

Ghosts, how else to describe them?  Jim (or Solomon, his birth name), childhood memories of a slender man with a full head of dark hair, horn-rimmed glasses, soft, smooth skin with gentle wrinkles and a serious expression.  Distant memories, a man in his forties, and then his sixties, and then lost, or at least to me.  Rose, the only image of her a faded black and white photograph – standing on the beach on Coney Island, the boardwalk in the background – her hand touching her dark hair as a gentle breeze blows through it; a soft round face, eyes wide open and engaged with the camera, small nose, prominent cheeks and an emerging sardonic smile.  All I have of her.  

I lean back in my chair and look across at the setting sun through the green leaves of one of the trees, the shape and color of the sunset shifting as the branches sway slightly in the mild breeze.  I close my eyes and listen to the laughter of the children, reflect on the generational line – grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren and my own transitory “self”.  There is a flash of insight, a sense of joy as I close my eyes, feel the breeze and listen to the chatter of the children, the chirping of the birds – life all around, a triumph over abandonment, grief and loss, all just thoughts that arise and disperse.  

A Zen koan asks “What was your original face before your parents were born?” 

Distant memories, consciousness as simply one of many thoughts; life as a continuum, with neither a beginning nor an end.  

Birth and death and no end to birth and death.  Our lives but a gentle ripple on a lake, a flower in bloom, a fallen leaf pushed along the narrows of a stream, “…a flickering lamp, a phantom and a dream…”, as described in the Diamond Sutra. 

As I sat with the koan, at a Zen retreat several years ago, I worked my way back through my life, to images of my parents and further back, through grandparents – to a point at which thoughts and consciousness ceased, or never began.  The absolute state of reality, an insight grasped for just a moment.

“What was your original face before your parents were born?”

“ANSWER NOW!”, and the Roshi, or teacher picks up the carved stick by his side and slams it onto the floor.  I don’t yet have an answer.  He smiles ever so slightly, puts down his stick, rings a small bell to signal the end of the dokusan (interview session).  I put my palms together in gassho, stand, take a few steps backward, and then bow and prostrate as a sign of respect for the teacher, my forehead touching the floor, my arms stretched out in front of me, palms facing up and then lifted slightly.  I stand, bow again and walk backwards to the door; the Roshi maintains his posture in full lotus position, silently measuring my steps, my awareness – the room is dark except for the flickering candles and the fragrance of the incense.  

I walk softly and quietly back to my cushion in the zendo (meditation hall), and contemplate this “original face”, before birth, before consciousness and thought, before “self”.  Impossible to describe other than through symbols. 

The twilight becomes magic, reminding me of late afternoon baseball games, playing through the fading light until we could no longer follow the ball, and it was time to go home for dinner.  My daughter gets ready to take the children in for their baths – I linger and watch as Japanese Beetles hatch and rise from the ground – dozens, or perhaps hundreds floating up into the oak tree, and across the yard, abstractions in a sky now tinged with a rosy glow.   Darker still, light flickering, shadows – I close my eyes.

The past exists wholly as the past; the future exists wholly as the future; this moment exists wholly as this moment.  Consciousness, which is illusion, binds it together. I hear the laughter of children, feel the warmth of an early summer evening and marvel as the beetles ascend upwards.  The moment is a painting, a thought that contains all that came before and all that may come after. 

A ripple in the pond, an answer to the koan.