Skip to main content

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.

Featured

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…

At the Bridge: In the Field of Redibility

There are moments when connection rises, out of the fullness of being alive alongside another. Once, it was the impulse to pick up the phone late at night— simply to share the space of being. In another age, it was the gentle rhythm of breath from the nursery, steady as the night. Even earlier, it was the intuition that sadness, marriage, and children belonged not to achievement or loss, but to the shared breathing of a life— fields that could be entered quietly, without mastery. This poem returns to that same field: the bridge between two lives, the breath held quietly in the night, where presence holds, and nothing needs to cross to be real— a breath first recognized in my early twenties in Sadness, Marriage, Children, and now picked up again here:

At the Bridge

The air is cold, moist with midnight. I stand on the near side of the small stone bridge, overcoat gathered around me, breathing in the quiet river. Across the water, she sleeps. Warm beneath her blankets, hair a scatter of light across her pillow, face at peace, no worries moving through her dreams. I close my eyes. I see her in the shifting light of morning, stretching, smiling, the day already opening around her, gently unbounded. And I stand here unknown. A deep, abiding fidelity asks for nothing. The bridge holds. The river moves. Something breathes freely between two shores. Cold, moist air settles around me. I stand at the edge of the small stone bridge, overcoat drawn close, breathing the slow river beneath. Across the water, she dreams. The day not yet pressing against her. The covers hold her warmth, her breathing is easy. Knowing this, I close my eyes. The bridge holds. The river carries both our hours. What lives between us moves without sound. Mist drifts above the river. Lights blink faintly across the water. I think of her asleep, held by blankets, untouched by sorrow. I close my eyes. And in the smallness of a breath, I feel her waking— stretching into the early light, smiling at the new day’s first softness. No crossing is needed. The bridge stands. The river flows. And tenderness, without arrival, fills the space between. The night air clings to my coat. I stand, breathing the hush of water below. The small stone bridge hums underfoot— steady, unbroken. Across the water, she dreams, her hair spilled across her pillow, her face at ease in some other country of sleep. I close my eyes. The morning unfurls around her, shifting the gossamer shades, inviting her into a new day. I stay where I am. The bridge holds. The river moves. And happiness, asking nothing, moves—quietly through me.

Standing where the bridge holds, the river moves, and being remains whole.

Comments