Press & Blog

Peter Gabriel’s “Face the Wall,” from the new album o\i, is a song about looking death in the face. For anyone who has sat zazen, the title is also an instruction. This essay reads the song through Zen practice: why we sit facing a wall, how the song’s darkness compares with Zen’s emptiness, and why the most hopeful figure in the lyric may be the witness.

Our culture hides the dying from the living and calls death a failure. Ram Dass called it the culminating adventure. On the spiritual work of making peace with what we can't control.