Cool Announcement: Reissue of Checkout Time is Noon: Death Awareness Haiku

My Dear Friends:

I'm happy to share with you this exciting news: NeverEnding Story contributor Robert Epstein announced the reissue (as a tenth anniversary edition) of Checkout Time is Noon: Death Awareness Haiku this past February.

Book Summary: The great poet Rilke declared: “There is no task as urgent for us as to learn daily how to die.” Yet, how many of us actually live our dying? To be born is to die. Few appear willing to die psychologically moment after moment, and yet it is this very dying that is essential if one is to encounter the Eternal Now, where all true life takes place. Described as “wordless” because intuition relies on a pre-reflective form of knowing, haiku appears perfectly suited to shed light on cracks in the night that reveal the unborn and deathless right in the midst of our living-and-dying. This is the essence of death awareness haiku--a poetry of truth, love, and freedom. Will you wake up with former US Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, who wryly insists: “Death is what gets poets up in the morning”?

The following are the haiku selected for your reading pleasure:

zen garden

nothing

stands out

that way home

falling

cherry blossoms

coyote tracks

I follow them

to the end of time

in pine shade

for a while I forget

this life will end



indigo night

in the cricket's song

no birth no death

Happy Reading 

Chen-ou