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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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What's likely for D-Day

        March 4 is tomorrow. This is D-day according to Governor Bill Richardson. We don't have to read tea leaves to assert that it is the end of the road for one candidate. So, why are journalists hedging their bets and parroting the campaign spin that Clinton is still viable in a post-D-Day race? My judgement is that we're just biased towards believing in extremely rare outcomes. Take the example of how we get anxious about flying even though the chance of a catastrophic event is next to nil. Clinton threatening Obama's lead is about as likely as any of us perishing in a plane crash. Can Clinton win the big states on D-Day? Absolutely, but any likely outcome based on all the evidence still leads to an Obama nomination.

        On to the data... Take a look at the first graph below which shows the trend based on polls conducted in Ohio from 1/31/08 through today, 3/3/08. Any individual poll may over- or under-estimate the true percentages of support due to random variability or bias in measuring the public's preferences. Think of taking your blood pressure at any given moment in order to ascertain your optimal blood pressure (variability) or of using an arm cuff that always reads too low or too high (bias). We have to take individual polls at a particular time point with a grain of salt. We'd have greater confidence in our conclusions if we looked at all the polls together. The first graph shows Ohio's trend. The solid black line is the trend line of support for Hillary Clinton. We can be pretty sure the true trend line that we're trying to measure lies somewhere between the two thin black lines. Barack Obama's trend is colored red. As of the day before the election, our best conclusion about Ohio's blood pressure is that Clinton has 50% support to Obama's 43%. This split could widen, but not enough for Clinton to overcome her delegate deficit. We could just as easily see a narrowing of the split tomorrow.



        In Texas Obama is tied just as of today with a steady 2 point lead for a period. What would it take to break this stability by tomorrow? I can't think of anything.




        We're not going to crash on this flight. We're going to have a normal, albeit choppy, landing, and any landing you can walk away from is a good landing. So, relax.


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Actual Data

        Nothing beats being able to study the actual data yourself. Here are the individual polls for Ohio. There were 7 pollsters that had more than one poll over this period, so we can see how their trends look. The remaining pollsters only provide information about a particular time point.



        And here's the actual data for Texas.

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