“I’m Willy. Some call me Gimp. Don’t mind Crow. She’s here for the tea and squares. I’m here because I can be. Tomorrow isn’t a guarantee for any of us.”

On that cheery note, Gyaltso dings a little bell and proceeds to take us — a sad pack of heartbroken future corpses — on a magically mystical meditative journey through an uber-serene Nirvana where all we do is sit and breathe for a few minutes. Allie is already bawling. Wendy breathes like a labouring moose with a sinus infection. Tooker breaks wind three more times because he had cabbage rolls for dinner. Me? I think about being dead. About Mama’s ashes out on the Bras d’Or. About Parry Homunculus, Ziggy Stardust, and Fuzzy Wuzzy the astrocytoma trio having a knock-down-drag’em-out war with Cletus the Fetus, with my body as the battlefield. A version of Gyaltso’s words from our New Year’s Eve encounter down on the wharf rings in my head as he beckons us back with the bell. We’re all dying. But only the lucky ones know it.

Over herbal tea and a plate full of vegan, gluten-free birdseed cookies that leave me longing for squares, we talk. About all the ways we hide our grief, our guilt, our dying. How we are supposed to just bury the evidence and move on. The way we aren’t supposed to say terrifying things out loud — especially when they are true — lest we make the fine folks around us feel uncomfortable. The kid in the “Emperor’s New Clothes” story, who had the audacity to shout about the dangling royal pecker and bare arse? Nobody liked that kid. That kid never got to be in another fairy tale ever again. But the emperor is prancing around buck naked.

We’re all still dying.

And right before the whole thing whirls off into some kind of nihilistic, nudist-shaming, existential depression session, and right before I can articulate the profound truth of how bad this tea and these cookies suck, Brother Gyaltso intervenes by asking us to close our eyes and pretend we are trees.

“Imagine yourself, strong, flourishing, and spacious,” he says, tilting his face and sweeping his arms up toward the cobwebbed ceiling.

How ’bout bent, crooked, and covered in fungus? Surrounded by nuts. With an agitated chipmunk inside.

“Now imagine any pain and suffering you perceive in yourself, or in others, or in the world, as thick, dark fog. Like air pollution,” he says.

I can see it.

“Now breathe that in. Because that is what trees do.” His voice is urgent, insistent. “They take in what would otherwise be destructive, and they use it. They change it. They let it change them. And then, they put something useful back out into the world. Oxygen. Life. This is what we can do. Pretend we are trees when life feels hard. Breathe it in. Soften it. Let it change you. Let your heart, your mind change it. Then offer the world whatever it is inside you that is needed. Peace. Courage. Light. A cup of tea and a good laugh. Don’t hide from the sorrows of the world. Welcome them in. Watch them transform. Be a tree in your life.”