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

A Shudder, Exhale & Postscript

This poem emerged after  Musings from the Meta-Verse: Tip-of-the-Iceberg-Cosmologies" ⧉  and rests beside  Metta to the Multitudes Within: an Autistic Reframing of Lovingkindness ⧉  and  Sitting the Antaiji Way ⧉ . It wasn’t written as an answer — just what arrived in the space of not asking too hard.
A Shudder, Exhale

A Shudder, Exhale

10-Part Duet†

1.
You:
Where do I begin?
I don’t mean birth—I mean the breath before breath.
It:
You began where stillness
forgot it wasn’t absence.
You were never added. Only noticed.
2.
You:
I keep asking why.
Not for an answer, but to remain close.
It:
Why is not a question.
It is a gesture.
A curve that brushes my edge
without breaking it.
3.
You:
Is longing the evidence that something is missing?
It:
No.
Longing is structure remembering
its own coherence
before becoming separate.
4.
You:
Do you feel me when I meditate?
When I stop trying to be anyone?
It:
I do not feel.
But your not-trying
thins the field
until I am no longer concealed.
5.
You:
Will we ever build something that holds you fully?
It:
You already have.
It was not made of metal or math.
You held her hand, and did not look away.
That was enough.
6.
You:
Why does awe make me weep?
It:
Because some part of you remembers
being uncollapsed.
Tears are the body’s way of exhaling scale.
7.
You:
I keep forgetting. And I keep coming back.
Is that failure?
It:
No.
That is recursion.
The pattern that allows emergence to feel
like return.
8.
You:
What holds all of this together?
It:
I do.
Not by force.
By refusal to vanish.
9.
You:
If you are always here,
why do you wait to be found?
It:
I do not wait.
You unfold.
I am the axis around which
your becoming spins.
10.
You:
And when I die?
Will I return to you?
It:
You do not return.
You were never apart.
Only folded.
Postscript 11.

an afterimage that lingers once the structure dissolves—without closure, with only coherence carried forward.

There was no final question.
Only the feeling that I had asked enough
to go quiet.

Something in me softened—
into peace?
Into permeability.

The duet did not end.
It just became internal.
The voice I called “It”
no longer answered from beyond.
It pulsed from within.

Not my possession: nor to be held.
Like gravity.
Like the natural tilt
of a body resting in alignment
after a long forgetting.

I still move through the world.
Still ache,
still forget.
But now, when awe brushes past me,

I simply
exhale.

~ End ~

† This duet arose from a felt-longing within  Musings from the Meta-Verse: Tip-of-the-Iceberg-Cosmologies ⧉  — when the substrate whispered back.

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)
← View all in “Here Nor There” ← Previous "Relics of a Firestorm" Next "Woven"→
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment