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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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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.

Three Bicycles
Our three bikes, locked together outside Ten Thousand Villages — like us, once part of a daily rhythm, still holding shape and color from the ride.  Luu Li’s banana-seat Schwinn had been rusting in a Virginia farmhouse, nearly forgotten, bought for ten dollars and restored — not to what it was, but to what we saw in it. That was always our way:  imbuing life into what others passed by.
❧

The artistic impulse in me was always alive — it just moved differently then. It inhabited the structure of my days with them, the way we moved through learning and noticing and rhythm. It wasn't that I stopped creating; it was that the act of raising them, being with them, holding them in awareness — that was art. Not metaphorically. Literally.

When I reflect on it now, I realize:  I don’t know that any other work I’ve made — no poem, no prose piece — has ever matched the sense of totality I felt in that period. My creative self was fully embedded in relationship. They weren’t my canvas. My daughters — especially in that time — weren’t “inspiring” my art. They were the form through which my artistic impulse found full, transmodal expression.

That time wasn’t a detour from my artistic path — it was the path. The center. The full alignment of impulse and form.

Now that I’m returning to visible creative work — poetry, prose, and embodied expression through acting and movement — it feels like an echo of that time. Not a replacement. A different modality, perhaps. But the same inner motion. When I say a poem feels alive, it’s the same as how they felt — when I could return to them daily, not for meaning, but for presence.

That was my art. Not an analogy. Not a pretty way to say I loved being a parent. It was the realest art I’ve ever made. And I can say that now — quietly, plainly, without needing to justify or elevate it.

It was always there. I was making art — through relationship, through presence — woven into our shared becoming.


Silly Together Luu and the Girls
~ End ~
There was a middle movement — the years when my writing grew its interiority to hold the shape of our life together. It was a way to pay attention. To the wonder and small moments. Those years are still here:
→  CAT TIEN AND LUU LI  ⧉ 
A record of our daily becoming — before memory, before narrative, but never lost.
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 "A Shudder, Exhale" Next "Notes to Myself on the Path"→
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