About

About 7 years ago, shortly after I retired, the matrix of my former life suddenly and unexpectedly became more fluid than it had ever been. I had no ties or obligations to a particular place. I remained a parent, but mostly at a distance. All the normal reference points of identity and familiar behaviors either loosened or disappeared. In the midst of radical uncertainty, I felt an unfamiliar and delicious lightness.

I have a strong orientation to dharma study and practice. I decided to indulge my unending curiosity,  explore a new lifestyle and a new intention: more spontaneity, radical presence, fearlessness, creative integrity and no regrets.

These conditions present an opportunity to blend life and practice, to make life as practice a more immediate reality. The world needs more of this anyway. A lot more.

Who would I become? A global nomad? A divine madman? A lion, unafraid? Unattached, like the wind? Or like space, not relying on anything? All of the above? Whatever it became, I desired to be more fluid and, I hoped, to live closer to a perpetually emerging truth.

I’ve explored new surroundings (Southeast Asia for most of five years), new activities, new endeavors and associations. Looked at individually, they may seen disparate. But together, they have become an enriching, provocative and ever-renewing path.

My identity and satisfaction as a writer has deepened, blending and bleeding spirituality, culture and politics such that they begin to merge–or disappear altogether. Like most everyone else, I seek the safety of the familiar in many small ways…. yet have also been able to permit structures to fall away.

This tiny corner is an exploration of what arises in the moment, spontaneous presence, Being being Itself as Us, seen through the lens of Dzogchen ati-yoga and the offerings of my precious teachers. All appearances, all perceptions are both real and apparitions, arising spontaneously from the infinite creative potentiality of nothing whatsoever; their essence empty, clear, unitary, open and unlimited.

Personal attainment does not depend on a permanent achievement of selflessness, but rather on our ability to dance on the edge, on a capacity to live in a stable awareness of both appearance and emptiness (no self) as One.

This is the reality of appearance and the truth of emptiness. What possibilities does this open? What does such a condition call for? — a freshness, simplicity and joyful, open presence: the roots of authentic compassion-deepening the wisdom that is surely the important challenge for every life in every time.

Who–or what–shall I become? An argonaut of the ineffable? A surfer on the turbulent poetics of decolonization, late-stage capitalism and advancing ecological devastation, responding in the most present and honest way possible to the emergence (and emergency) of this world.