Dandelions Blooming in the Cracks of Sidewalks ― Stories from the Bedside of the Dying

So often, the thought of death evokes our worst fears. We anticipate the opposite of anything we call living. Yet, something different happens when we invite death into the conversation of our lives, for it enters alongside all the gratitude, love, and beauty. Death reveals these gifts as often as tragedy and pain. Around the bedside of the dying, we learn an intimacy that includes the entirety of the human experience. We open rather than fight or run. We gaze into the eyes of death to ask what shines through all the brokenness. What remains? AmitaLhamo uses her luminous stories to reveal the power of simple human kindness and the profundity of being. Within such places, souls peek through the soft spaces of broken hearts like dandelions blooming in the cracks of sidewalks. No matter which way we turn, we find one garden, one ground—we discover the wonder of any heart. “What dies was never really ours to keep anyway. What is deathless has been our true nature all along. No one can ever separate us from that—it is we who forget about it. At any moment, in any circumstance, there can be a remembering, a glimpse, a realization. These precious stories tell of such moments on the journey, told by one with an unbound love and courage to have accompanied so many on their way.”Lama DrimedNorbu “In the Buddhist teachings that anchor my understanding of how one’s consciousness transits dying and death, there is no higher aspiration than ‘all-pervasive compassion’—vast compassion that arises from a wisdom beyond formulaic constructs to spontaneously meet the needs of others.This book encourages us not only to offer our time, love and attention to others, but also to engage our own practices of prayer and meditation, so that we gain confidence in our own gestures of compassion, love, and joy to create benefit in the great interdependence of living and dying.”Chagdud Khadro