''to see void vast infinite look out the window into the blue sky'' --Allen Ginsberg
This is Allen Ginsberg's death haiku, written about a week before he died. It is the Japanese tradition of haiku poets and zen masters to write 'death poems' ideally as a way to keep one's awareness, even if sick and dying, in order to write last words that reflect one's understanding of life. As a practitioner of both meditation and haiku, Ginsberg admired this tradition followed by Japanese and Tibetan Buddhists called ''Sky-Meditation.'' While enunciating this idea, Patricia Donegan wrote, ''Wherever we are, we can always simply step out, look up at the sky, or even imagine the sky... and breathe out a sigh. For a moment, we are back to our natural state of mind, which is as vast and open as the sky; all else are just thoughts, feelings like clouds passing by. In any moment we can come back to 'sky-mind'.''
