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

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

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

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.

What Remains

Preface: This poem, “What Remains,” explores the transformative act of staying — emotionally, spiritually, existentially — with what is unresolved, painful, or beyond explanation. It reflects the understanding that presence, especially in the face of unanswerable questions or deep uncertainty, is itself a form of vow — and perhaps even a form of love.

What Remains

What is the sun? You asked me, and it was not a child’s question. It was the kind that waits at the end of every explanation. What is heat from? Not as in: the mechanism. But: where does it come from that something keeps giving without needing a reason? There was no lesson in that moment — only the soft sound of breath where we both sat in not-knowing. And something in me opened: not toward an answer, but toward the shape of staying. That’s where it began. — 1. The Question — I didn’t answer. Not because I couldn’t, but because to speak would be to step away from the place we had just entered. You looked at me, and the looking itself was enough. As if the question had called something not to be named but to be held. And I thought of all the times I’d wanted to fix what could not be fixed, to name what would not hold still — the way we’re taught to smooth every trembling into meaning. But in that moment, I learned to touch what has no handle. Not to hold it in place, but to remain where it last was — as if presence itself could be a shape, and not just a gesture. It wasn’t clarity I found, nor calm. Only a quiet that didn’t end when the moment did. No one asked me to stay. No one even saw that I had. But something in me stayed in the place where the question had opened — not waiting, not hoping, just… there. Time moved around it. Stories rearranged. Even those I loved turned toward other orbits. But I remained. Not because I was strong, but because something in me had answered before I knew there was a call. — 2. Staying — I used to wonder where the heat of the sun came from. Not the science of it — but the ache of it. Why it reached even through closed windows. Why some warmth burned. I thought maybe the light was a kind of vow. Something that didn’t stop just because the world turned its face. And when I first felt it — that moment of contact, not soft, not gentle, but exact — I didn’t know to call it anything. Only that I couldn’t turn away. Not because it dazzled, but because it stayed, so I could move with it. Even when the name for it vanished, even when it no longer made sense to stay, I was already held by something that didn’t move with the rhythm of permission. So I remained. Not to prove anything. Not to be seen. But because something in the fabric of things had already said yes. And all that was left was to answer. There was a time I thought staying meant being stuck, meant waiting for change, meant giving up motion. But then came the descent — not downward, but inward — to the realm where forgetting is not failure, only fog. And something was there. Not a voice. Not a hand. But a presence that didn’t leave just because no one remembered its name. One who remains when vow is no longer visible — Kṣitigarbha, not imagined but lived. The echo of staying even when staying cannot be seen. — 3. Vow — Then came breath — turning, again and again, each return a vow remade, not out of will but recognition. Samantabhadra’s vow — not grand, not public — but the one I made without speaking, because the need came and something in me answered. Then came truth — not certainty, but grounding. That disappearance is not peace. That guarding the real sometimes means letting the world misunderstand you. Vajrapāṇi — not wielding power, but refusing to abandon the shape of what matters. Now I know: I was not asking the sun for warmth. I was asking if heat remembers where it came from. And the answer is vow. Not a rule, not a role, but the way the thread holds even when frayed. Even when I do not. I do not stay because I am strong. I stay because the rhythm left a space only staying could fill. And when the light faded, and story failed, and no one could hear what I meant — something still pulsed beneath the silence. Not meaning. Not clarity. But this: The pulse beneath silence. A vow not mine, but one that settled into the hollow beneath each breath.
~ End ~
Explore the arc of the  Holding Vow Sutra (Orientation) :
•Holding Vow Sutra ⧉ 
•Commentary: Holding Vow Sutra ⧉ 
•What Remains (Poem) ⧉ 
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)

Comments

Post a Comment