In 1985, top mountaineers Joe Simpson and his friend Simon Yates went climbing in the Peruvian Andes. After a series of accidents, Simon was forced to cut the rope which held him and Joe together. At the time, Simon believed that he was sending his friend to his death…

Rodney Smith (c. 1947) was a hospice caregiver for a number of years, and is currently an author and the guiding teacher of the Seattle Insight Meditation Society, an organization he founded in 1993. Smith was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan and drafted during the Vietnam War, serving in Belgium as a medic. He returned home and became a social worker, when one evening he attended a lecture by Ram Dass in Cincinnati, Ohio that made him inspect his life more deeply—becoming a vegetarian and doing meditation. In 1976 he joined the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Massachusetts as a long term yogi and later joined staff and performed menial jobs as a cook and janitor. While at IMS he developed a desire to go deeper into his vipassana practice, and in 1979 met the Burmese Theravada monk Mahasi Sayadaw. He chose to return with Sayadaw to Burma and was there ordained as a Theravada Buddhist monk—studying in Thailand as a monk for an additional four years. He then decided to return to lay life, sensing that the monastic life was not his particular calling. While in Thailand he read the book "Who Dies?" by Stephen Levine and decided he would like to work with the dying. He returned to IMS and met up again with Ram Dass, who helped him get to work at a hospice located in Houston, Texas. He served in hospice settings for 17 years, and in 1993 he founded the Seattle Insight Meditation Society—where he is now a full time Dharma teacher. He is the author of Lesson from the Dying and Stepping out of Self-Deception (Shambhala 2010).

1. People and Places
2. Story
3. Fact Files (cross-curricular connections)
4. Self-Study Activities
5. New Words

CHAPTER 1
Getting ready

It was early morning. I was lying awake in my sleeping
bag. My friend Simon was asleep beside me. We were in
a tent in the Cordillera Huayhuash, high in the Peruvian
Andes. We were about forty-five kilometres from the
nearest village.

I got up. Outside, it was getting lighter. It had snowed
in the night and the air was very cold. I walked to our
cooking area and passed Richard's small tent on the way.
Richard was a traveller who we had met in Lima. We
both liked him. He told a lot of funny stories about all the
interesting places he had visited around the world. We
had asked him to join us and guard our things while we
were away climbing.