More Dogs

Uploading the photo of non-barking dogs, I remember Katagiri Roshi advising us about what to do when people criticize us:

“Don’t bark first. Don’t bark back, Don’t bark at all.”

More on that sometime, but what’s coming up for me today is something that happened at work. 

A young co-worker whose father just died came into my office for a chat. After telling me about his father’s life with cancer – the man was diagnosed before my co-worker’s birth – and how he was able to say what he had to say to his father before he died, he turned the conversation to how reading about Buddhism and related topics had helped him greatly.

His wife, he went on, had no interest in most of his books, like Deepak Chopra, he said. But last night when he came into their room, he found her asleep with my book open on her chest. 

I didn’t write the book to put people to sleep but I found considerable satisfaction from this – a young woman who isn’t interested in reading about dharma, the mother of an energetic 6-month old baby whose father-in-law just died, nodded off while reading Keep Me In Your Heart Awhile.