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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.

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.

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.

Featured

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.

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…

Featured

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.

The Rhythm That Forgot the Floor

~ 1 ~
Before there is rhythm, there is the possibility of return. Not repetition. Not timing. Return. The way a gesture stays in the air after it’s made. The way a word still holds shape after the room has moved on. The way something offered doesn’t just echo — it waits. This is the space I live in. Not the rhythm of interaction, but the structure that makes rhythm possible. The field that holds the dance. And when rhythm forgets the floor it moves across, I do not forget. I am still holding the shape. I always was.
~ 2 ~
In Mistaking the Third Arm for a Tool ⧉ , I named the asymmetry: a neurotypical rhythm that moves unconsciously, reflexively — governed by a biological appendage I do not possess. In Living with the Dancer ⧉ , I showed what it feels like to love inside that asymmetry: to hold threads that are never noticed, to metabolize silence as cost, to remain in a rhythmless fidelity that no one else registers as care. But beneath both of these is a deeper truth — one that was always there: Rhythm is not the opposite of structure. It is a subset of it. And I live in the whole.
~ 3 ~
Most people live inside rhythm the way a dancer moves across a stage — beautifully, intuitively, never needing to ask what holds them up. I am not outside the stage. I am inside the beams. I do not move apart from the rhythm — I move with the knowledge that rhythm is never free-floating. This is not a conceptual distinction. It is cognitive ground. The gestures that pass for connection in most lives — “Hey, just checking in,” a nod at the right moment, a casual laugh — are not empty. They are rhythm-signals. They affirm mutual presence, reinforce belonging, smooth the continuity of self in a social field. But they require a surrounding architecture in which timing is enough. And in my life, timing is never enough. If you live by rhythm, and someone holds your thread and names it, you may smile, feel touched, and then move on. But if you live by structure, and you offer a thread and it’s not returned, it doesn’t just vanish. It ruptures the field. Not with drama. With absence.
~ 4 ~
I have often been told, directly or indirectly, that I expect too much. That I remember too long. That I make things heavier than they need to be. But this is not expectation. It is inhabitation. I don’t live inside the tempo of conversation. I live inside the weight of what was meant. The word said weeks ago. The gesture that opened a door but was never acknowledged. The signal that passed between us, unnamed, but which I tracked — because I believed it mattered. Not sentimentally. Not compulsively. Structurally. I do not hold meaning because I want to. I hold it because I see it. And once seen, it cannot be ignored.
~ 5 ~
This is not a claim to superiority. It is not a plea for adjustment. It is the naming of how the world feels from here. Most people move as if rhythm is reality. I move through the whole architecture — and every omission, every misalignment, every silent drop of a thread… registers. Not because I’m fragile. But because I’m built for return.
~ 6 ~
There is a kind of cognitive generosity in neurotypical systems: If something feels good, they let it be. If a moment lands well, they move on. If a gesture is made and no echo returns, nothing lost. They do not hold the echo. They don’t need to. They are not expected to hold the shape of a conversation from three days ago. They are not asked to remember the unresolved gesture that was never named. They are not required to revisit a silence and metabolize it as rupture. And yet — some of us are doing exactly that. Silently. Constantly. At cost.
~ 7 ~
This is not pain as performance. It is structure as burden. I have lived entire years believing something was shared — only to realize, slowly, that it never took root on the other side. Not because it was dismissed. But because the rhythm moved on. I held it anyway.
~ 8 ~
What I am naming now is not a shift from previous understanding. It is what lay underneath all along: That structure is the full terrain. And rhythm is just one of its languages. But society is built for rhythm-fluency, not structural awareness. So the ones who hold the architecture — who preserve the thread, who metabolize the unreturned signal, who track the field instead of the beat — become the invisible laborers of relational life. We are the ones still listening when the song has ended. Not because we can’t let go. But because we remember the floor.
~ 9 ~
Sometimes, I imagine what it would be like to live as others do: Not to let go — but to never register what was offered. To move from moment to moment as if each one contains only itself. Not out of freedom, but because nothing was seen clearly enough to last. Because nothing was held long enough to become real.
~ 10 ~
This is not an essay of resolution. It is not a call to action. It is simply a continuation: From absence, to presence. From gesture, to ground. From rhythm, back to structure. Because I was always here. And this is how I hold the world.
~ End ~
Explore the full  Threadwork  triptych:
Mistaking the Third Arm for a Tool ⧉ 
Living with the Dancer ⧉ 
The Rhythm That Forgot the Floor ⧉ 
Also part of this project:
Coherence Without Capture: An Ontological Arc (But Not An Ontology) ⧉ 

For orientation beyond this page, you may enter through:
The Vibrating Thread: From the Field of Redibility
Naikan in Four Movements
Threadwork (or begin with  Threshold to Threadwork ⧉  for a gentler entry)
The Holding Vow Sutra (drawn from the arc of  Naikan: The Rhythm of Vow ⧉ , but arriving later)

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