Mono No Aware: A Season of Impermanence

Mono no aware (moh-noh noh ah-wah-reh) — the Japanese phrase for the particular ache of beautiful things passing.

I didn’t find Zen. Zen found me… and lately, it has been finding me in the hardest places.

A hospice room. A phone call I was but wasn’t ready for. A letter written in Japanese that I could barely read. Holding it in my hands, knowing what it meant, not knowing how to say anything comforting to my mother.

Grief has a way of making everything else very small. And very clear at the same time.

My aunt Miyoko recently passed as a Buddhist priest. So direct and no-nonsense, yet she moved through this world with a purposeful grace I am still learning to understand. Rooted in something ancient, something unshakeable, something that made you feel steadier just standing near her. She understood impermanence the way most of us only read about it. She lived it. She taught it. And then, quietly, she embodied it one final time.

When my cousin Tatsuya wrote to tell us she had passed, his letter came in Japanese. I sat with that letter longer than I want to admit. My Japanese is limited, rusty, learned in fragments across a lifetime, and was not enough. And yet I had to find a way to bring its meaning to my mom. My mother, who has dementia. I sent a copy to my sister, and awaited her translation. As I waited with my mother, who some days knows me completely and some days is somewhere else, somewhere I cannot follow. I sat beside her and read what I could. Filled in what I couldn’t. I watched her face move through something ancient and wordless. The kind of knowing that lives deeper than language, older than memory, deeper even than the disease that has been quietly stealing pieces of her.

She understood. Not every word, but the weight of it. Something moved through her I hadn’t seen in years, tears, silence, a grief too old for language. I put my arms around her, trying to comfort us both.

And in that moment I understood something too.

Zen was never about having the right words. It was always about being present enough to sit inside the ones you don’t have.

This season of my life has been the most humbling teacher I have ever had.

My dad spent his final months in hospice care, his body worn down by a broken hip that had been repaired but would never let him go home again. He always wanted to go home. That never stopped, not once, even near the end. And I had to be the one to remind him, gently, over and over, that home wasn’t something he could return to anymore. That was one of the hardest things I have ever had to say to someone I love.

His passing, when it finally came, was bittersweet in a way I didn’t expect. Grief, yes, but also relief, for him, from the pain, from the wanting, from a body that had stopped cooperating with what his heart still asked for. Some part of me could finally exhale for him, even while another part of me was breaking.

My mom’s dementia. The daily practice of showing up as a caregiver when you are also a daughter, still grieving, still learning, always human.

Some days I show up with patience and presence. Some days I show up anyway, depleted, uncertain, doing my best with what I have left.

Both count. Zen taught me that. Miyoko taught me that.

Here is what I know now that I didn’t know before

Impermanence is not a concept to understand. It is a lived experience. And it changes everything.

You can study mindfulness for years and still be undone by a Tuesday afternoon letter written in a language you only half remember.

Grief and gratitude are not opposites. They live in the same breath.

Also, presence is not a luxury for people who have time. It is the only thing that actually helps when everything else falls away.

The ancient teachers knew this. They built entire philosophies around the truth that nothing lasts. Not because life is cruel, but because impermanence is what makes each moment worth paying attention to.

I feel that now in my bones. In my mom’s eyes. In a letter I could only half read. In a grief that doesn’t announce itself, it just quietly sits down beside you and stays. I am not writing from a place of having it figured out.

I am writing from the middle of it. The caregiving, the grief, the love, the exhaustion, the gratitude, the daily practice of coming back to what is true and simple and real when everything else feels uncertain.

That is what KotsuZen is built on now.

Not perfection. Not arrival. Not a life that looks good from the outside.

A life that is honest. Present. Rooted. Even when the ground is shifting beneath your feet and the words on the page are only half yours to read.

And underneath all of it, a thought I keep trying not to finish. The one that starts when she laughs at something only she can see. Talking to her stuffed pig she has adorned with earrings from her recently rediscovered jewelry box. When she reaches for my hand the way she always has. When she tilts her head at me with that look, the now goofy, unstoppable, ever-ready look that has been following me through my entire life now like the world’s most devoted little shadow.

My mom has always been my energized buddy.

Still going. Still present in her own way. Still her, even now. Even inside the fog that dementia wraps around a person like slow weather. She is still in there. I know she is. I can feel her.

And that is exactly what makes this so hard.

She Was More Than My Mom

She was my travel guide. My interpreter. My cultural compass through every temple gate, every stone garden, every incense-thick morning in Japan that I would not have understood without her walking beside me. Matter of fact and reverent in the same breath, the way only she could be.

She could move through a sacred space and explain it to you without ever breaking the silence of it. She made ancient things feel personal. She made foreign ground feel like home.

Every temple we all explored together, Kyoto, Nara, the small ones tucked into hillsides that no guidebook ever listed, she named them, explained them, stood quietly inside them with a kind of belonging I was still learning. I was always learning from her.

Aunt Miyoko walking with us. A Buddhist priest among the places her practice was born. The three of us moving through spaces where impermanence was not just philosophy but architecture. Stone worn smooth by ten thousand hands. Incense smoke rising and dissolving. Bells that rang and then returned to silence.

I didn’t know those trips were also lessons.

I know now.

Every sacred journey begins with a single step on ancient stone. This is the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage trail. A UNESCO World Heritage path through towering Japanese cedar forest where mindful walking becomes spiritual practice. For over a thousand years, seekers have climbed these moss-covered steps toward renewal, clarity, and the quiet wisdom that only a sacred forest retreat can offer.

Mono no aware.

The Japanese phrase for the particular ache of beautiful things passing. It is not quite sadness. Nor is it the gratitude. It is both at once. The bittersweet awareness that this moment is precious because it will not last.

My mom taught me that word the way she taught me everything, by living it so naturally I almost missed it.

I am not missing it now.

I try not to let my thoughts finish the sentence that begins with what will it be like when…

I try. Some days I am better at it than others.

Zen does not ask us to pretend the hard things are not coming. It asks us to be here fully, right now, in this moment. Before the next one arrives. To not spend today’s presence on tomorrow’s grief.

So I come back.

To her laugh. To her hand in mine. To the way she still looks at me sometimes like I am the funniest thing she has ever seen. Inspecting my clothes. This mostly goofy little energized buddy, still going, still here, still bits of my mom for this moment.

I come back to that.

One breath at a time.

That is the practice. It’s all that practice ever is.

What I Write, and Why

And I write my books that meet you where you are.
The Essential Handbook of Daily Zen Hacks , because simplicity saves us when complexity overwhelms us.
Daily Zen Hacks Guided Journal , because sometimes writing our way through is the only way through.
Kotsu Zen Teen Energy (you may still see it under its earlier name, Sigma Teen Energy), because teenagers are carrying weight no one taught them to put down, and they deserve real tools, not platitudes. This next generation needs Zen more than any before them, and they need it in a language that actually reaches them where they live.

If you found your way here

Maybe life got loud. Maybe someone you love is slipping away slowly, in pieces, in a language you can’t quite reach. Or Maybe you are the one holding everyone else together and quietly wondering who is holding you.

You are in the right place.

Not because I have the answers. But because I am asking the same questions. Sitting with the same grief, the same love, the same impermanence. And I have learned that showing up honestly, with one quiet breath at a time, is itself a practice worth everything.

Miyoko knew that.