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Orientation 2

Naikan In Four Movements

This four-part Naikan series grew out of a course I offered at Baltimore Dharma Group in Spring 2025. While Naikan is often framed as a tool for self-reflection, I came to see it as something more relational: not a system of correction, but a practice of returning—again and again—to what holds us, what flows through us, what we leave behind, and what we remain with.
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Orientation 3

Threadwork

Here, in language, is the closest I have come to tracing the patterns I live inside — and the patterns I see others living inside, too. ...That, to me, is the heart of this offering: not to win empathy through performance, but to make coherence inhabitable — even when the pattern isn't matched. These pieces are not arguments. They do not aim to persuade. They exist to demonstrate — without explanation. To resonate — without claiming universality. To name the cost of asymmetry — without blaming the other. To hold clarity — without self-erasure.
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Orientation 4

Holding Vow Sutra: An Introduction

Introduction and Intention:  This is a sutra, but not a sutra in the traditional sense. It is not part of the Buddhist canon, nor is it offered from a seat of transmission or formal authority. It is, rather, a thread — woven from lived practice, shaped by fidelity, and rooted in a vow that did not begin with me and does not end with me.
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The Autistic Mode: A Way Of Thinking

We all have moments of deep concentration—those times when we are so absorbed in something that the world recedes. A musician practicing alone, refining a passage with exquisite focus. A philosopher turning an argument over in their mind, testing its weight from every angle. A scientist working through the layers of an equation, adjusting variables, refining the logic until it holds. In these moments, the noise of the world fades, and what remains is a kind of clarity, a steady presence of thought moving toward resolution.

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Threshold to Threadwork

Introduction: There are two doors into this work. The one below meets the moment. It is written in accessible language—for those seeking clarity about autistic experience, and especially about how it differs in rhythm, in structure, and in the invisible labor it asks of those who must translate themselves to be understood. But this isn’t the only way in. There is another door—quieter, less translated, more interior. If you're looking not just for insight, but for shape—if you’ve ever sensed that what goes unspoken is sometimes the most coherent thing there is—you may find yourself at home there.
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Musings from the Meta-Verse: Tip of the Iceberg Cosmologies

Before you begin: please take a moment, settle in, enjoy the image above—of me holding my baby daughter as a first-time dad, tune into the frequency of restful wonder. Now allow your mind to wander outward from the edges of that image: to the room, to the street outside, to the vast sky beyond the vast sky. Further—past the solar system, past the galaxy’s edge, past everything known—to the edge of the cosmos. And then…

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Woven

I never stopped making art. I just didn’t always call it that. What I made with you, my loves — in those days we shared — was the most embodied form of relational creation. Art was us — there was no interruption. Something Luu Li and and I talked about yesterday landed deeply. She said, “Wow Papa, 54 years! I'm so glad you’re starting to do art again.” And I told her — honestly — it’s never left me. But after that, I found myself thinking: when I was homeschooling Luu Li and CT, I wasn’t just not doing art — I was expressing my creativity through my life with them.
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Looking for an explanation

        I've done a little analysis of the demographic information of several large cities in the east[1]. Baltimore has a high murder rate (as does Washington, D.C.) amongst cities with populations around 500 thousand. What distinguishes Baltimore from other cities is that our median income relative to the median income of the entire state is about 1:2. Newark, NJ has about the same ratio (but two-fifths of the population of Baltimore). No other major East Coast city fares as poorly relative to the environment that envelops it. New York City, for instance has a ratio of 9:10 with New York state and a murder rate that's a sixth that of Baltimore's .
        The things that can't, of themselves, account for Baltimore's murder rate include overall population, and the poverty rate, which compares well with other large cities. Baltimore's 22.6% rate vs. Boston's 22.3%, New York's 19% and Philadelphia's 24.5%.
        One aspect of Baltimore that is a relative strength is that poverty rates amongst Baltimore's African American population are at the median among these cities. Our 26% rate compares well to, say, Pittsburg's 38%, Chicago's 32% and Atlanta's 39%.
        So something is different in Baltimore not amongst those who are in poverty, but, rather, amongst those who are earning a middle to lower middle class income. Maybe the weakness of the classes which provide a "bridge" between the upper middle class and those in poverty is causing a rupture in the usual perceptions of upward mobility. Not only perceptional differences but effective differences may exist in the actual mechanism of upward mobility[2]. This in turn leads to an environment of despair that becomes a breeding ground for addiction, leading to an intractable drug culture, and related murder rate.
        Here are the kinds of shifts I think we should aim for to help Baltimore come more in line with the rest of Maryland:

1. Maintain roughly current population, but invest in increasing the income and education level of middle to lower middle class residents, with particular focus on opportunities for their children, thereby gradually pushing up the median income.

2. Invest in our best neighborhoods and housing to attract upper middle class residents who will substantially increase the tax base.

3. Make the city attractive to the creative class and the entrepreneurial class who can generate jobs.

4. Incentivize city-residency amongst those who work in the city but currently choose to live in the county.[3]

5. Begin to repair city-county, city-state divides that have been neglected for so long they have become accepted wisdom. First, we have to fess up to the fact that Baltimore is no longer the flagship city of Maryland. It hasn't been for decades, and we need the rest of Maryland to help us.

        It might just be possible that when Baltimore's prosperity matches better with Maryland's prosperity, there will be an abatement of the psychic conflict that gives rise to the drug culture and the violence that goes hand-in-hand with that.


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You can see plots describing the relationship of city/state income ratios and city populations to the murder rate here.


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[1] Cities I have examined so far are Baltimore, Newark, Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York, Yonkers, New Haven, Wilmington, Jersey City, Chicago, Atlanta, Charlotte and Jacksonville. Data at www.city-data.com and crime rates at http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004902.html.

[2] There are structural realities of our era which make upward mobility more difficult than in the industrial era. Globalization is often cited and, with it, the loss of stable employment with better than subsistence income. The nascent service economy has yet to mature into something that can replace the security provided by manufacturing jobs for working people.

[3] Johns Hopkins along with the East Baltimore Development Inc. is using this strategy by combining their biotech developments with mixed residential and retail neighborhood development, hoping to attract biotech workers to live near where they will work.
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