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.
READ MORE

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.
READ MORE

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.
READ MORE

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.

Featured

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.
READ MORE

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.
Labels

Sitting The Antaiji Way*


My jerry-rigged cushion at the sesshin led by Shohaku Okumura Roshi and Rev. Hōkō Karnegis at Sanshin Zen Community. For five days: sit 50 minutes, do walking meditation 10 minutes, repeat, fourteen times each day, broken only by 3 hour-long meal breaks and 6 hours (or less) of sleep. During that time I wrote these three short poems.
❀
day three: body at ease mind at ease self settles onto self this precious inheritance: the Literal Sitting of Shakyamuni Buddha through my body the Literal Sitting of Dōgen Zenji through our bodies the Sitting of Body and Mind Dropping Off the Sitting of Joyful Ease, Practice-Enlightenment
without a doubt we can manifest
      Here and Now      Here and Now      Here and Now
❀
Just Sit
     change, change, change, change
     give up perfection

     sometimes crooked or straight
     sometimes dull or clear

     in pain     no pain

           Don't Panic

     neither grasp nor push away

     the Pure Light of Buddha pours forth
     from Every Thing
❀
Even The Leaning Tower Of Pisa Stood Erect For 500 Years

This edifice
my sitting can stand erect
for 50 minutes
All the while
     Skin
     Bones
     Muscle
     Tendons
have crumpled into a heap

Thank you skin
Thank you bones
Thank you muscle
Thank you tendons

When the bell sounds
     I gather you up
     bring palms together
     and offer our practice to all beings
❀
(And from my journal on the day after sesshin ended, 6-4-19)
I miss it, I miss the zendo — hellish as it was sometimes — dependable it was at all times — and at all times simple.
You cannot escape your embarrassing ideas, fantasies, dreams and hopes about sitting zazen: 'I have to have a good reason to endure this.' But it would be impossible to sit with this idea as your motivation. You burn through it quickly; discover it is a useless idea. You let it go, and you sit. And develop returning, and returning, and returning.

* The Antaiji style of sesshin: Shohaku Okumura Roshi has continued this style of sesshin from his teacher Uchiyama Kosho Roshi of Antaiji in Japan. Uchiyama Roshi first did it this way in 1965 and describes this practice in his book "Opening The Hand Of Thought" in the chapter "The World Of Intensive Practice."
Labels:

Comments

  1. horseygirlskyJune 06, 2019 7:26 AM

    I'm moved by your poems and your drawing. Thanks for putting words to this.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment