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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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He Never Left

I met Li-Young Lee after performing in a stage adaptation of his memoir, less than a year after my older brother had died at 42. He wrote in my copy of The Winged Seed something that landed with a weight I didn’t name at the time, but have carried ever since. What follows is not a defense of anything — of style, tradition, or school. It is a remembrance of a meeting — and a listening that continues beyond words.
Brother on the Pathless Path
In 1997, after a production of The Winged Seed at Pangea World Theater — David Mura’s play adapted from Li-Young Lee’s memoir — I chatted with Li-Young, my copy of the book in hand. I had played Li-Young. As a child. As an adult. I had studied his language — the gestures, where weight was and where it lifted, the space he left around words. I had tried to inhabit the quiet that followed his lines like an after-image. When he signed my book, he didn’t offer a platitude.
He wrote: “To Luu, my brother on this pathless path. Li-Young.”
It was not a compliment. It was a recognition. I’ve kept that copy with me all these years. Even when his name slipped from shelves. Even when his books fell out of print. Even as the literary world turned toward sharper edges, louder arguments, and more confrontational aesthetics. He did none of those things. He listened. To breath, to lineage, to the spaces between syllables. He listened for the substrate beneath language — not its utility. And somehow, that became unfashionable. I want to say what I think no one is saying: Li-Young Lee had no answer to the crowd. Expectation lived in a parallel domain, never intersecting with his own current. He wrote because something sacred broke through silence. His lyricism wasn’t softness. It was radical interiority — a form of resistance so deep it bypassed performance altogether. His tenderness wasn’t submission. It was devotion. To the dead. To the unnamed. To the ache of memory that never resolves.
❧
But is that really the right question? Because — I haven’t forgotten. Because his voice once met mine. Not across a table — but inside a silence we both knew. That line he wrote for me — my brother on this pathless path— wasn’t about poetry as profession. It was about poetry as condition. The pathless path is the one without audience. Without acclaim. Without promise of continuity. And yet we walk it. Still. Because we remember what it is to write not for placement, but for presence. Not for riding the spectacle of waves, but for what lives just beneath. Not to be heard — but to listen so fully that the listening itself becomes the poem. Li-Young, you never left. Unforgotten. As brother. As witness. As keeper of the path that vanishes even as it’s made.
~ End ~
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 "Notes to Myself on the Path" Next "You Were Always Redible"→
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