“Nature knows that people are a tide that swells and in time will ebb, and all their works dissolve ... As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves. We must unhumanize our views a little and become confident as the rock and ocean that we are made from.”

- Robinson Jeffers

We left the San Francisco Bay chop behind us somewhere past Richmond. The Alma settling into it, eighty feet of 1891 Douglas fir finding her hay-boat rhythm. The kind of unhurried journey she was built for. I was in my mid twenties, a deckhand, doing what deckhands do, which is mostly watch and wait and haul when told to. The wind that had been snapping the halyards all morning let go of us there. The water went from slate to brown. Stillness settling in on San Pablo Bay.

We passed the old wine warehouse first. Boarded up since Prohibition, its leaning gray lacework pilings. The prow of a massive metal sunken boat that once was tied up along the docks. It could have been the Jersey waterfront I grew up looking at from the wrong side of a chain-link fence. Rust and abandonment look the same everywhere, I think. It’s the only truly universal architecture.

Then the island of rocks and cormorants. Then the lighthouse. Then, coming around the point, China Camp.

You see it before you understand it. A dock that isn’t so much built as accumulated, planks added by whoever needed one more foot of dock that year, no permit, no plan, tied off wherever a piling would take a line. Shacks that the state now calls historic and preserves accordingly. Boats anchored out in the shallows, painted the colors of whatever paint somebody had left over, still shrimping water that hadn’t held a real quantity of shrimp in years. Nobody had told them to stop. Or maybe they had, and this was the answer.

We rode the high tide in, because you have to, the Alma draws almost nothing, flat-bottomed, built to lie up on mud and wait for the water to come back and get her. We tied off with two feet of water under the keel. I remember doing the math in my head, the tide charts, the six hours we had before we’d be sitting in it, and something in me relaxed the way it does when a plan actually accounts for the ground beneath it.

I looked over San Pablo Bay. The golden hills across toward Napa. The water dark and opaque. The emerald green sky and the sherbet pink clouds streaking across it. Slack tide. I climbed off Alma onto that slapdash dock. The ground felt like the water, landsick. I stumbled towards the cluster of structures on shore.

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I was there for the Heritage Day festival, Chinese-Americans gathering on the site of a shrimping village that survived the Exclusion Act by disappearing into a place nobody with money wanted. I gave tours on the Alma, saying words I’d memorized about hay and commerce and sail. Down the shoreline, Grace Quan rode at anchor, a San Francisco Bay shrimping junk a boat builder I knew had built plank by plank with his own hands, a replica of something that used to work these waters for real.

Frank Quan was the real deal. The boat was named after his mother. Frank grew up at China Camp. Son of Italian and Chinese parents. He still fished the bay like they did when it was a working town. He lived in the only habitable structure on the beach, an old houseboat that had been dragged up on shore before Frank could remember. His garden surrounded the house, a driftwood fence guarded against the browsing deer. There was no one like Frank. He was from another time all together. His cracked hands, tanned wrinkled face. They were a part of China Camp just as much as all the other fixtures.

I went back more times than I can count after that. Not for the festival. For the place.

It wasn’t polished. That’s what I keep returning to when I try to say what it was. Everything at China Camp had been made by somebody, for a reason, with whatever was on hand, and none of it apologized for showing the seams. I’d spent my whole childhood watching men in New Jersey drive to jobs that made things smooth and finished and identical, and here was a village built entirely out of not doing that.

I tried to get back once under my own sail. I took my own boat out with some friends for a work weekend and somewhere off Raccoon Strait the water started coming in through the wooden hull faster than I liked. Fast enough that math stopped being interesting and became urgent. We turned around. Made it back low in the water, pumps going, to the houseboat commune at Galilee Harbor, and I remember standing on the dock afterward shaking, catching my breath. That one didn’t get to China Camp. But it taught me something about what I was willing to risk to keep going back.

I didn’t have language yet for what I was chasing out there. I just knew that the city made things smooth in a way that scared me more than daylight through dried planks did.

Back in the city, many years later, there were dinner parties. My roommate’s friends mostly, crowded around a long farm table in an old Victorian flat in Hayes Valley, wine going around, people doing well by any measure, gallery shows, book deals, the kind of success I told myself I wanted. I’d try to steer things toward the work itself, what someone was actually making. Mostly what came back was who’d been spotted at the new restaurant, who was showing where. I’d sit there and feel myself drifting back across the bay, wishing I were asking Frank Quan about abalone and tide tables instead.

Jung said life begins at forty. I used to think that was just a nice line. I understand it more literally now, the first half runs on hunger, for wanting more, for going further, for whoever’s boat is bigger down the dock, and you don’t notice you’re hungry, you just keep rowing. The second half asks a quieter question. Not more of what. Just: is this actually mine.

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The oven at Salmon Creek Farm is cob, built into the hillside, sitting just below the garden and the orchard, next to the outdoor kitchen. Wood-fired. I light it three hours before anyone’s hungry. Small fire first, kindling and split oak, let it burn down to coals. Then more oak on top of that, let it burn down again, building the heat into the cob itself so it’ll hold through a whole night. I lay the wood the way Frank taught me to lay coals for spare ribs on that beach at China Camp, years before I knew this garden existed, before I had any idea I’d end up here. Not stoking a big flame. Creating enough embers that the heat lasts all night.

The people around the oven most nights are folks I’ve known a week, sometimes less. People passing through on their way to somewhere else, the way I always used to be the one passing through. The land is the only thing that stays. I’ve started to notice I don’t mind that anymore — the faces changing, the land constant underneath them — the way I used to need to know I’d see someone again before I let myself care about them.

There’s an apple tree in the garden above the oven, planted long before I got here, bearing fruit that has nothing to do with any tree I planted or any orchard I designed. It just answers the ground it’s in. The fog it gets, the wind off the coast, the particular cold that comes from the ocean at night. I want to be like that. Not something I built and am still steering from a distance, the way I steered the shop, the way I still catch myself steering things. I want to be something rooted long enough that whatever grows out of me stops being mine and starts being this place’s. Salt air and redwood and cold Pacific fog, fruiting through me instead of the other way around. The way Frank was China Camp, right down to his cracked hands.

One night making pizza a conversation started to go deep, the way they sometimes do with someone you’ll only know a week. Then it drifted, a name here, a name there, someone asking who else had come through the farm, who was worth knowing. I didn’t say anything. I put another log on the fire and listened to the fox in the distance.

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Horizons are invitational edges between what is familiar and what must be imagined: the main horizon in my life is the line over which, imaginatively, my future lies. - David Whyte

I’m sitting on the third floor of a water tower in Mendocino. The desk I’m writing from is next to a double-hung, single-pane window. The top is open. The air rolling off the ocean comes through, a briny breeze. The view overlooks Mendocino Bay. Fog hangs above the horizon, sun glowing in the gap between the sea and the fog bank. I think of what could be out there right now.

The water tower has a field of wildflowers and grasses around it, and this is where I had my birthday picnic last Saturday. I turned forty-two. I didn’t think of it as a momentous birthday. Unlike forty, it wasn’t the turning of a new decade. But I was soon to discover that forty-two was a horizon of its own kind.

After the picnic, Allie, Jessica, and I walked down to the headlands to see what was left of the sunset. Along the narrow path of wild brassicas and ice plants, Allie said something that has left me thinking ever since. She asked: What was happening seven years before today?

It was hard to recall at first. 2019. I was living in San Francisco, running my shop, The Aesthetic Union. I think it was the first year I said to myself that the life I was living wasn't sustainable, that I needed something else if I was going to survive. The year I took up meditation again. The year I dove into Zen practice.

I asked Allie why she’d asked. She mentioned an essay David Whyte wrote about horizons and cycles. Forty-two, she said, was the end and the beginning of a new seven-year cycle. Whyte writes that horizons mark the threshold between the world we inhabit and the one that seems to wait for us. Seven years between horizon and landfall. Forty-two was the horizon of thirty-six. It was the world that was waiting for me when I set things into motion in 2019.

As we stood on the edge of the cliff and watched the sun drift toward the fog, I turned that over and over in my mind.

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A few years before 2019, I’d taken a class on Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy of child development. In The Kingdom of Childhood, Steiner argues that human life unfolds in seven-year cycles, not just in childhood but across the whole of a life. I remember sitting with that idea and feeling it land somewhere physical, not just intellectual. The first seven years: you lose your teeth. Something that was part of you simply falls away, and what grows in its place is permanent. The next seven: puberty, the body remaking itself whether you’re ready or not. Steiner believed these thresholds don’t stop. They keep coming. The body just gets quieter about announcing them.

I didn’t read this at the time of the class, however when I was researching cycles for this essay, what he said about forty-two stopped me cold. At this threshold, Steiner wrote, something shifts in the soul:

“I am now on my own, my bodily nature no longer contributes to the development of my soul and spirit.”

For the first forty-two years, nature does the growing. After that, the work is entirely yours. No more automatic vitality. No more biological momentum carrying you forward. Just you, and whatever you decide to make of what’s left.

The horizon I must have imagined at thirty-six is, more or less, what my life has become. I moved from San Francisco. I sold the shop. Through hell and high water, I moved on. Moved onto what? Walking along the edges of these cliffs I ask myself that. What did I make myself into?

Honestly, I’m having a hard time restarting my art practice after burning out hard. I don't have to do it the same way, or so I'm told.

When I look out this window I feel like I’m doing something right. But that’s only half the story. Most of the bones in my body are telling me to create something completely different. To farm, to build, to make a physical manifestation of abundance. How do I do that with what I know how to do best, to print, to put ink on paper. To spread the word? What word? What horizons?

That’s the truer answer to these questions. The horizon is not a place that can actually be reached. It’s only the world that is waiting for me after the journey of getting there, and when I finally arrive, there will be another horizon waiting. Right now, in the water tower window, I’m writing from a horizon I once dreamt up. And now I must find the courage to keep on the path to the next.

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“When you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely. If you do not burn yourself completely, a trace of yourself will be left in what you do.”

― Shunryu Suzuki, founder of Tassajara Zen Mountain Center

The photo on my screen didn’t quite register. Smoldering gray ash. A familiar stone wall. A bare tree in front of a column of smoke. A follow-up text from Nick read: “Zendo burnt down. What the fuck is even going on anymore.” I was planing Douglas fir 4x4’s when I felt the buzz. I set the plane down and looked at the photo for a long time. I was supposed to be getting ready to go to Tassajara for Work Period. For the first time in five years, I had no plans in April.

There is a particular smell to fresh Douglas fir shavings. Something between rain and resin. I kept milling the wood. The fresh fir saw dust filled the air with a pine resin incense. The wind moved off the ocean through the tops of the redwoods. My hands knew what to do. My mind was somewhere else entirely — fourteen miles down a dirt road in the mountains above Big Sur, in a valley I had driven into every spring and autumn for four years, in a room where the creek outside the window ran so loud the first night I couldn’t sleep. I thought about my first week at Tassajara, sweeping the same path three mornings in a row before anyone explained why.

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Most people have never heard of Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. Those who have usually know it one of two ways — either as a hot spring resort tucked into the Ventana wilderness of Big Sur, accessible by a fourteen mile dirt road that most rental cars won’t survive, or as the first Zen Buddhist monastery established in the United States, founded in 1967 by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and a group of his American students who wanted to practice seriously and needed somewhere the world couldn’t follow them. Both things are true. In summer the gates open and guests come for the baths and the silence and the food, which is renown (several cookbooks have been written by past chefs or tenzos). In winter the gates close and the monks settle in for months of intensive practice. In between, twice a year, there is Work Period — a few weeks when volunteers come from everywhere to help ready the monastery for what comes next. You work eight hours a day and eat three meals and sit zazen, a style of meditation, morning and evening and sleep in a narrow bed and wake before dawn to the sound of a wooden board being struck in the dark. In exchange you get something harder to describe. I spent four years trying.

I found Tassajara the way a lot of people find Zen — through grief, and through a friend who knew something I didn’t.

A few years before I knew anything about Zen I was teaching at California College of Arts and met a fellow teacher at a faculty meeting. Tom Ingalls’ very first question to me was “are you a Buddhist?” I was not. He was about forty years older than me and had lived a storied life in the graphic design world. He shared a studio with David Lynch in grad school, was the first employee at WET Magazine. Between conversations about new restaurants, good design, and gallery openings, he kept asking me to come meditate with him at San Francisco Zen Center. At some point I finally caved. The building takes up half a city block, all imposing brick from the street. Inside, tatami mats and cushions. I showed up on a Monday night to a group of about thirty people. We meditated for twenty minutes and then people started sharing their names and their addictions. Then Tom gave a talk about his own path there. I had walked into a Meditation and Recovery group. Walking home I kept thinking about what it meant to see people who had gone through hell and not only pulled themselves out, but were reaching back down to help the next person.

I had been inside institutions that claimed transcendence before. In Catholic school the nuns would extol the glory of their faith and in the next breath berate children for being children. Once a nun pushed me down the steps as I stopped to look at a statue of the Virgin and Child. I was seven or eight. It’s hard to remember through the trauma of daily abuse. I didn’t stop looking for what that statue promised. I just stopped trusting the people guarding it.

The next couple of months Tom and I got dinner and went to the meetings. It was a good routine but I was still struggling with codependency and I think Tom could see that. He invited me to a day-long meditation at Green Gulch. I was intimidated. I could sit for twenty or thirty minutes but not all day. I woke up at 6:30 to catch a ride with Tom and stuck a joint in my pocket in case of emergency. Green Gulch sits in the green hills of Marin, a short walk from Muir Beach. The zendo was a cow barn once. You could still feel the dimensions of it when you sat. When we got there the teacher was already in the hall, someone Tom knew. He told a few jokes, showed us how to sit more comfortably. We went for walking meditation and did chi gong. At lunch Tom introduced me to Ed Brown over a bowl of lentil soup. As he shook my hand he asked what I did for a living. Letterpress, I said. He told me I had really strong hands for an artist. I liked him. Ed Brown wrote the Tassajara Bread Book. He was a Bay Area celebrity of sorts. You wouldn’t have known it from the handshake.

I went back. And then I went back again. I never needed the joint. Something was happening to me in that old cow barn and I couldn’t explain it and didn’t particularly want to. I wasn’t reading scripture or studying doctrine. I was just sitting facing a wall in Marin County at seven in the morning and feeling, for the first time in a long time, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be. My posture improved. My attitude improved. I started waking up earlier than I needed to. I started looking forward to the drive.

I asked Tom what else I could do and he told me about Tassajara. Work Period specifically — the shoulder season between winter practice and summer guests when volunteers come to help open the monastery for guests. You work hard, you eat well, you sit zazen twice a day, and you soak in hot springs that have been running out of the mountain since long before anyone built anything around them, only the Esalen peoples were there then. I applied shortly after that conversation. This was January of 2020. COVID shut Tassajara’s gates before I ever got close, and kept them shut for two years. I waited.

Two years later I picked up two students at the last stop on the paved road, Jamesburg. We loaded into my truck for the fourteen mile “road” into the mountains. Four wheel low. Deep gullies from the winter rains had washed the rock road to the edge of thousand foot drops below. The hillsides looked like Zion — sandstone bluffs and giant boulders — but greener, wilder, like the ocean floor tilted sideways and shot up into the sky. The two students talked the whole way in. The food. The long hours. The hot springs. The sitting, so much sitting. I was only half listening. I was watching the road and the canyon and thinking I had no idea places like this existed in California and I had lived here for sixteen years.

As we descended the landscape changed. Greener. Humid in the hollows. A long row of dusty cars lined up along the road, every one of them having made the same journey over the mountain. We parked and walked to the gate — mud earth, thatched roof, like something that had grown there rather than been built. I stopped. What was this place? It felt like the monastery Han Shan might have wandered into when he came down from Cold Mountain, civilization appearing suddenly in the middle of the Ventana wilderness like it had always been there and the rest of the world was the aberration.

Through the gate I had no idea where anything was. I stopped the first person I saw and asked. Then the hand cart, trip after trip back to the truck, hauling everything down into the valley. Someone pointed me to my room assignment and I climbed up into the loft of an old barn, hot and dusty, half walls between the sleeping areas, a real life monastery experience I thought. Then I found out my actual room was below. Finished but spare. A single bed, a small window. Out the back the creek ran fast with the spring snow melt, loud enough that first night that I lay awake wondering if I’d ever sleep. By the end of the month I couldn’t sleep without it.

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I hear what sounds like a wooden ball being dropped down a flight of steps. A rhythmic hollow sound, tempo quickening. Then a loud crack. I wake up. It’s dark. 5:30 in the morning. Cold in my small room. The twin mattress is hard and my sleep wasn’t good, even after nearly a month on it. An arm or leg falls asleep and I turn over. The ball starts down the steps again. This time I’m awake and I know what it means.

I don’t struggle to find my clothes in the dark. They are in the same place every time. Loose fitting pants. A shirt that wraps around my chest, secured at the sides. My Birkenstocks right where I left them. I hurry to the bathroom. Three other people wash their faces quickly and go out the door. I do the same.

The han and jikido are making the noise that woke me. The han is a wooden board about two feet square, hanging from a rope on a peg in the wall, hollowed out on the back to resonate the sound. The jikido is the person striking it with a wooden mallet. On the front, where the mallet lands, a poem is scrawled in black: Wake up. Wake up. Great is the matter of birth and death. Don’t waste your time. Each strike mars the letters a little more. The mallet has carved a deep crater into the wood. Eventually it will break and another will take it’s place.

Black shapes move on dirt paths in the predawn light. The valley walls rise above, blocking the stars, cutting velvet silhouettes against the sky. My body does not want to move. My mind tells it to keep going. I climb stone steps grooved by many mornings. I slide off my Birkenstocks and line them up beside a dozen others. My bare feet find the cold worn wood of the engawa. I’ve learned where the nail heads are, where the boards creak. A small morning dance. I hold my hands at my solar plexus, left thumb tucked into palm, right hand wrapped around left. It makes the morning a little warmer. I turn the corner and go through the door.

The air inside is still. Warmer. Sandalwood and aloewood hit me like a wall. Two oil lamps burn low on the far side of the room, one on each side of a dark stone figure. I bow as I enter and walk toward it. In the dim light the statue takes shape slowly. Soft features. Dark stone hair in a bun. Seated robes flowing down. A peaceful expression. Eyes slightly open. The large stone Buddha sits, waiting patiently. I walk past the altar and turn right.

My cushion is on a raised platform ahead. I cannot get there soon enough. Yesterday was long. It took a while to wash the dirt off in the baths. The hard bed gave my sore body no rest. I climb onto the platform and feel my weight sink into the cushion. Soft and worn. Sat on many times before by others. I face the wall with everyone else. A small bell, then a large one. We settle in. I stare at one spot on the dimly lit wall. Twenty minutes, another bell. A five minute stretch break. Another bell, another twenty minutes. This is my favorite part. Somewhere outside one bird wakes up and gives its first call of the day. Another answers. The pale blue light comes through the paper screen window above the wall where I stare. The world is waking up and I’m awake to greet it. This is why I told my body to move this morning. Those twenty minutes go by faster than the first. Another bell, another roll down, another bell.

I slide my now-cold Birkenstocks back on and descend the stone steps into the gravel courtyard. A coffee mug hangs on a peg with a strip of masking tape on it. My name written in Sharpie, and my departure date. I pour a cup and stand there. Quiet before the first word of the long day ahead.

Every morning at 8:30 we gathered in the work circle, all hundred of us, volunteers and students and staff blinking in the mountain light, and I loved every bit of it — the rattlesnake spotted near the Narrows, the Stone Office open for purchases, hands needed to unload the vegetable truck coming down the long dirt road. I loved the work too. After a winter sealed in this wilderness there was so much to put right. I’d drain the bathhouse plunges and scrub each tile and fill them again to exactly 109 degrees. I’d rake the sycamore leaves off the paths, brush cobwebs from the cabin corners. Simple work. Good work. The kind that leaves your hands tired and your mind quiet.

Meals were communal. Large metal trays came out of the kitchen filled with marinated tofu, broccoli, noodles. In the morning oatmeal, stewed fruit, orange juice. We lined up and chanted before the containers reached us.

We reflect on the effort brought us this food and consider how it comes to us.

We reflect on our virtue and practice, and whether we are worthy of this offering.

We regard it as essential to keep the mind free from excesses such as greed.

We regard this food as good medicine to sustain our life.

For the sake of enlightenment we now receive this food.

I limited myself to two heaping bowls of whatever was presented. I was ravenous from the work.

After lunch I would patch meditation cushions, wash the unending dishes, or sweep the walkway around the zendo. The railroad bell ended the work day. Exhausted, dirty, sore, I lowered myself into 109 degrees of water and stayed there until the dinner bell.

It wasn’t always like that. My first week, I was moved mid-morning from oiling outdoor furniture to cleaning the bathhouse. I hadn’t finished the oiling and I could see no reason for the change. I was distraught. Maybe it was years of being my own boss. Maybe it was a week of sleep deprivation. My crew lead found me mopping the bathhouse floor. I told her I needed to finish the other job. She said this was my job now. I said I came here to practice Zen. She told me this was the practice.

She left. I stood with the mop and the steaming plunge and the sound of the creek outside. The large smooth-barked trees lining the water. That was all there was. I had to let go.

Work became easier after that. Not because it got lighter but because I stopped grasping at the outcomes so hard. I made friends. The endless dishes didn’t bother me. I started to see that every job carried equal weight whether anyone acknowledged it or not. The old construction men shoring up a cabin on a slope were doing exactly as much as the student cleaning the zendo bathrooms. One could not happen without the other.

After a month at Tassajara I drove back to San Francisco. My print shop was the same but a few things had gone wrong while I was gone. Client work unfulfilled. The email down. The social media person had quit. I was annoyed but I didn’t have an aneurysm. I knew things needed to change if I was going to keep living in good faith to myself.

Work period at Tassajara became a refuge. I started making time in September and April to drive that fourteen mile dirt road into the mountains and disappear into work as practice. I started bringing friends and family to share in the beauty of the valley. The deeper I went the more I loved it. I was not objective about Tassajara. I didn’t want to be.

In 2024 the Abiding Teacher Leslie James asked me to be Work Leader. The traditional monastery role is called Shissui — Still Water. I took the title as instructions: be steady and flexible. I was honored. I was also, I would learn, now inside the machinery.

As Work Leader I became the person people brought their conflicts to. I learned to help resolve them, and in turn it helped me resolve things in my own life. I was responsible for assigning tasks to all the volunteers. Standing in that position felt like a long way from the morning I stood with a mop telling my crew lead I hadn’t finished the furniture. I didn’t know much about Zen. I still don’t. But I knew how to show up.

Over the next two years and four work periods I served as Work Leader. Each morning I met with crew leads and staff to hear what they needed. More hands for a job, a specific skill set, a task waiting on supplies coming down the long dirt road. At 8:30, I rang the railroad bell and called everyone to the work circle. When everyone was gathered I lit a stick of incense at the work altar and offered it to Samantabhadra, the Bodhisattva of Great Action. Then I looked at a hundred faces waiting on me to say good morning. Arrivals, departures, announcements, assignments. Most people were glad to be there. A few never liked the work I gave them. When someone was really struggling I joined their crew and worked alongside them. I learned that from my years at the Maritime Museum. I preferred a skipper hauling lines with the crew to one standing on the deck calling orders.

What I was slower to see was the politics that ran beneath the surface of the practice. I had come to Tassajara to step outside one world and found the same human complications waiting inside this one. The monastery is not a solution. It’s a crucible. That’s the point, I think. But I was slow to understand what that meant for me personally.

My jukai — the taking of lay vows — happened on April 17th, 2025, in the outdoor courtyard between the kitchen and dining room. An altar was set up facing the creek. I spent most of the day in the kaisando, the founder’s hall. A traditional Japanese structure built by hand, designed by the legendary Paul Discoe. Sloping wooden roof. Paper sliding doors. The smell of tatami mats. An altar with a photograph of Suzuki Roshi and his teacher. A house for the ancestors of the tradition. I sat on the tatami in a long robe and let my mind go where it wanted. My years in San Francisco. Teaching with Tom. Ed Brown’s handshake at Green Gulch. The year before had been hard. Tom died of heart complications. A Zen community I had helped build fractured. I had ended ties with my former business. I sat with all of it in that quiet room and waited.

In time I was led out and processed to the bowing mat in front of my teacher, A. Robin Orden. I had met her in the Tassajara kitchen years before, baking cookies. She is about five feet tall, in her seventies, grew up in Brooklyn, and has a take-no-prisoners attitude. When I decided to take my vows I could think of no one else. I repeated them after her. She handed me the rakasu I had stitched together over the previous months. A five-paneled garment worn around the neck, a symbol of Buddha’s robes. On the silk backing she had written the dharma name she was giving me. A name that is both a description and an instruction: Artisan Spirit Cultivating Peace. As I put it on I noticed the pieces of fabric I had taken from Tom’s old rakasu and stitched into mine. His lighter blue against the newer dark indigo of mine. I had been so focused on the weight of the ceremony that I was surprised to look up and find every face from work period surrounding me in the courtyard. Four years of shared mornings. These were my people. I thought this was my place.

That September I returned for what would be my last work period for a long time. I didn’t know it yet but I could feel it. The long golden light of autumn in the valley. Bushy chaparral and jutting blue yucca on the steep hillsides. Rusted red and turquoise cliff faces dripping spring water into the creek, now choked with pale yellow leaves. The season when we readied Tassajara for the long winter ahead.

Outside the valley my life was heading somewhere else. Further north. A new print studio. I couldn’t feasibly spend the extended time at work period anymore. But there was something else. A Zen priest I had a serious unresolved conflict with had been hired at Tassajara for the coming year. I tried multiple times to open a mediated conversation. After several months a response came back. The problem lay within James. I declined to engage further. I resigned as Work Leader.

Cultivating peace, I had learned, was not only about repairing things with other people. Sometimes it was making peace with the fact that some things could not be repaired. A boundary was also a practice. Trying to convince someone of their own wrongdoing was not.

I still believe in the practice. I believe the mop in the bathhouse was a teacher. The masking tape on my mug. The first bird before dawn. Tom asking me if I was a Buddhist before he knew my name. Every one of those things taught me something the institution didn’t give me and couldn’t take away. I’m just free of the belief that corruption cannot touch even this.

The dry wood and meditation cushions burned quickly. The bronze bells melted. The 2,000 year old statue of Buddha dropped through the altar and shattered on the floor. There was going to be no spring work period to attend anyway, whether I was going or not. No work circles. No one wondering where I was. No conflicts, soiled hands, or hot spring baths. The residents had been evacuated for a hazmat crew to come clean up the site. Not volunteers but hired professionals from the insurance agency. Sterile white suited people sifting through the debris looking for probable cause. Zen in practice.

I put the phone back in my pocket and kept planing the wood. The fir shavings smelled like incense. The wind moved through the tops of the redwoods. Somewhere a bird called once and went quiet.

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Disclaimer: I am not a Buddhist authority. I am a guy who prints things on old machines and once spent four years waking up before dawn in a monastery because someone told me the hot springs were worth it. They were. The people in this piece are anonymous. The monastery is real. Whether I understood any of it correctly remains an open question.

In the morning here on Albion Ridge the early spring fog pulls back to the ocean like the land getting out of bed. As the morning sun starts warming the redwoods the bark starts steaming. I can hear the waves roll up the valley from the mouth of Salmon Creek. Standing here in the garden I can see the snail trails on the logs left by nightly intruders. The dew clings to the grass, verdant new lettuces, the abundant ground cherries, and the fava plants. The favas have just started flowering and are already several feet tall. In the early winter they were planted. Not only for food, but to give nutrients back into the soil.

The fava flowers are white with a bit of purple on them. At some point I will turn some of these plants into the soil. I’m not looking forward to it, but I know it’s necessary. The dirt caked into my overalls will be worth it for the healthy summer crops. For now, it’s nice to see this pale green miniature forest.

When I was living on the Holy Family, the fishing boat made houseboat from 1926, the mornings were much the same. The fog would roll back off Richardson Bay. The sun would warm the wood on the docks. The seagulls would argue with each other over scraps. The forests there were boat masts. The view was blue with the gemmed sparkle of light off the wind crests in the middle of the bay.

Those days I didn’t have much going on. I had recently been laid off from my job in San Francisco. I occasionally crewed on boats for the little bit of money I needed to live this simple life. Most days I would wake up slowly. There’s no rush on the water. I would open my stove to stoke the little fire, make my bed and convert it back into a bench. Move into the galley to make coffee. Place my pot in the green copper sink and use the hand pump to fill it. Place the coffee on the burner and walk to the stern to open the boat up to catch the light morning breeze. I would usually see a friend coming up or down the docks. We would briefly chat, catch up on the news from the previous day. The town gossip. Coffee done, the friend on their way.

Sometimes I would take my coffee up to the flybridge and watch the clang of the masts and wind on the water. Coffee without the rush is a thing to savor. I even knew it then.

I would ride my old Raleigh over to Mill Valley to see what there was to see. Visit friends at their woodworking shops and art studios. Most nights I would row my small dinghy to a large old ferry boat stuck in the mud a few docks away, SS Vallejo. This massive structure was built in the late 19th century and had many alterations over the years. I was told the previous tenants had been Jean Varda, Gordon Ford, and Alan Watts. It was also a meeting spot for Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Maya Angelou, Timothy Leary, Ruth Asawa, and Gary Snyder.

I would go up to the room where Watts once lived. It was the former pilot house on the very top of the boat. It had a floor to ceiling round window looking northwest towards Mount Tam. The sunsets from that room were the highlight of my days then.

We would gather for dinner down below. The boat had a long galley down one side, a long serving table. This deck had originally carried train cars across the bay. It was a large space which split the main train deck in half. All the carpentry was hand-hewn and most was painted into some psychedelic hippie dream world. A full-size Egyptian sarcophagus that held the ashes of a cat. The dinners were filled with friends, reciting poetry, playing music, and finally a pretty tipsy row back home.

That large round window in Alan Watts’ old room overlooking Mount Tam became a print. The tule reeds of the bay, distant islands, the light on the water, and the magnificent shifting color of those sunsets still grab hold of me and show up on the press through me.

I was still living on the Holy Family when the letter arrived. I had applied to the Outer Cape Artists in Residence Consortium on a whim, not expecting much. They said yes. Two weeks in the Ray Welles dune shack on the Cape Cod National Seashore in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

These shacks started as cabins built by the U.S. Life-Saving Service to house men who would look out for shipwrecks along Cape Cod’s treacherous coastline. After a canal was dug most ships avoided the coast and the shacks were taken over by residents, artists, and writers of the Cape as summer dwellings. More structures in the dunes were added over the years from what could be hauled out on the ever shifting sand roads.

My first encounter with the dune shacks was on Art’s Dune Tours with my grandmother on a summer trip to Provincetown when I was about twelve. I remember the shacks jutting out of the sand hills. Colorful lobster pot buoys hanging outside their doors. Massive quahog clamshells lining the paths up to the entrances. It seemed like a place where fishermen and mermaids would gather. A total escape from the treacherous world. My child mind was enchanted.

Fifteen years later I was riding in Art’s Dune Tours truck again, being dropped off at the Ray Welles Cabin. This was the exact cabin I remembered being awestruck by as a kid. High on a dune, it overlooks the sand road and the sea. Cedar shakes covering the sides. A fishing net draped deck wraps around three sides of the shack. A composting outhouse a short distance away. Rosehips, poverty grass, and beach peas dotted the dunes and held them tight as the Atlantic wind would whip the sand away in the afternoon breeze. The squeak of terns in the distance. Stepping inside the cabin I could see it was made up of several smaller cabins fitted together over the many years. A small kitchen with cast iron pots hanging on the wall. Two bedrooms, an inner and outer. The outer being cooler with the big screened windows facing the ocean and catching the cool breeze. It was chilly at night. There was an old woodstove with the side castings of a man pointing to the mountains with a woman in his arms. With few trees in the dunes, I’d keep warm burning driftwood.

The residency was not a period of producing work. I walked along the beach as far as I could most days. I would find seaweed, shells of all kinds, skeletons of unknown sea creatures. With miles and miles of parabolic sand dunes seeing another person was a rare treat. One day I saw a park ranger on an atv studying Piping Plover hatchlings. Occasionally I would stumble upon another dune shack, they dotted the dunes. Some in better shape than others but all of them unique in ways only a makeshift builder could amalgamate over the years of washed up debris and salvaged windows. Like my life on the water, I followed a routine. Pumping water from the well before it got to hot. Breakfast, usually oatmeal. Then a morning walk over the dunes. I stared at the sea a lot. I thought about how far I had come from taking those dune tours with my grandmother. Sitting on the sand bank, thinking, staring out to sea, I was absorbing. Drinking it all in. The salt-sprayed breeze. The sound of it in the long sharp dune grasses. The isolation. Letting it all soak down into my marrow. When I look at my work now I can see where it springs to the surface.

In 2019 I released “Hold This Close,” a collection of poetry and artwork published out of my shop, The Aesthetic Union. It was the first book I had ever made. I had been writing poetry for a few years before that, starting in 2017 after my grandmother passed away. Writing was one of the only ways I could cope with the loss of her. Writing all those memories down was not enough. I needed to send them out into the world. I never studied poetry but I loved reading it, and writing it seemed to flow. First I shared my poems on Instagram. I was afraid of being that vulnerable on that platform, but I thought, if people didn’t like them they didn’t have to read them. I started a weekly poetry reading, reading what I had been working on alongside poems that inspired me. Quite a few poems came from that, and they were well received. Because I owned the print shop, I decided to publish a book of them. A small edition with a lot of attention to detail. The paper, the size, the font, the binding — everything had a specific reason behind it. Because of the quality over quantity, I knew it was something a publisher wouldn’t be able to do, so we made it all ourselves in house.

Hold This Close quickly sold out of the first 100 copies. I made another edition. It sold out. I increased the edition and made another. It sold out. Finally the fourth edition of 1,000 copies sold out in less than a month. With the sale of my shop the book is now out of print, and I don’t know when, or if, it will ever return.

The fallow period before that book had been thirty-five years. It was being seeded as I worked with my grandmother planting seedling Christmas trees on the tree farm she owned. It grew as we dug for clams on the Cape in the summer and cooked them in the parking lot of our motel on a small Weber grill. It blossomed as I said goodbye to my grandmother on the phone as she lay in her bed dying. I was told she smiled when she heard my voice. She passed that same day.

My hands are now covered in the fragrant smell of fava leaves. I’ll make pesto from these shoots. The air has gotten warm. I can tell the day will get warmer — that feeling you get when you’ve lived in one place long enough to start sensing the little changes. I wonder how this landscape, this view, this coast will sink its way into my bones and spring forth next.

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“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” — Henry David Thoreau

“Low tide exposes what is often hidden” — A Sausalito Anchor-out

It was a Saturday in 2012 and we were running the Alma up from Sausalito, a scow schooner built in 1891, broad and flat bottomed, her sails pulling easy in the morning wind off the Bay. We’d just finished Maritime Day at Galilee Harbor and were making for China Camp. I was on deck when we came around the end of the docks and I saw her.

A Monterey trawler. Steep raked bow. Fantail stern. Somebody had built a small cabin on the former working deck, careful work, and even from the water you could see she’d been loved. Her bronze fittings had gone green but her paint was fresh. She sat there in the slip like she belonged to a different era, which she did.

I told the skipper she was the most beautiful boat I’d ever seen. He said last he heard she was for sale.

That was all I needed.

I’d been volunteering at the San Francisco Maritime Museum since 2008. Maintaining wooden boats. Learning to sail. Teaching high schoolers to build small craft on weekends. The wind didn’t negotiate. The Bay didn’t care what school you went to.

San Francisco in 2012 was loud with a certain kind of ambition. Disruption, they called it. I was on the edges of it — letterpress printer at a fancy studio. I had a couple of solo art shows. Living with a woman in her big apartment in a nice neighborhood. Early on Instagram, posting photos of wood type and ink-stained hands at six in the morning. People followed.

But I gave it up. The apartment. The studio. The trajectory. I started spending every free hour on the water instead, crewing historic boats, learning the tides. Out on the Bay you could see the city from a distance.

That’s the only way I’ve ever really understood that place.

I asked the skipper if he knew who owned her. He did. A few days later I was in contact with Heather. She’d bought the Famiglia Santa — Holy Family — in San Diego where she’d been working as a salmon trawler. Built in Sausalito in 1926, she’d spent most of her life as a sardine purser. When Heather got her she needed work. Heather’s plan was to sail her back to San Francisco Bay, repair her, fish commercially again. I can’t imagine that passage — San Diego around Point Magdalena, up the rough California coast, all the way north. But that was Heather. She’s made differently.

After one season fishing Heather decided to do something else entirely. Sold off the commercial fishing equipment — that paid for the cabin renovation. Added a portable shower, a head, a storage bench that converted into a bed, and a little wood stove for heat. A roof over the fantail stern where you could sit with morning coffee and watch the fog burn off the Bay.

We took her out on Richardson Bay. Driving from the fly bridge was twelve feet above the water, every wave amplified like you were at the end of a pendulum. Down in the wheelhouse the steering wheel was from an old Model T Ford, connected to the fly bridge wheel above by a motorcycle chain and cog system. I’ve grown to love these perfectly simple systems. The engine was loud beneath the floorboards but steady. The gauges read normal. I peered into the bilge, checked the propeller shaft turning below. A tiny bit of water. Nothing serious.

I knew I was falling in love when I saw all the quirky touches and fixes accumulated over the years. Many hands had worked on this boat. I knew mine were the next ones.

I was terrified. I knew this was my future floating home. With the handshake she was mine.

I’d lie there for a moment before moving. A seagull, or the rock of the boat, something always woke me early. The sun made wavy light patterns on the ceiling, streaming through the white curtains, the reflection of the water moving constantly. I could hear it on the hull. The creak of the lines as they strained against the cleats.

My feet found the grooved Douglas fir deck, slightly sloped to shed water. I’d walk forward through the shelter built over the old work deck, transitioning into the pilothouse. Smaller in there, more cramped, everything in its place. Dishes rested in tight fitting nooks so they wouldn’t knock loose when the boat swayed. A table folded up when you needed it and disappeared when you didn’t.

Coffee on a boat is magnificent. After the moka pot did its work I’d carry my cup back through the sliding stern door to the fantail. Two chairs and a little round table I’d found at the flea market fit perfectly there. I’d sit and watch the water. Kayaks going by. People walking the docks. Sometimes I’d wave. They’d look back with a particular kind of curiosity.

San Francisco in 2012 didn’t know what to do with someone living on the water. The city had spent decades making sure of that.

Fifty years before I arrived the hippies had figured it out first. They came to Sausalito in the late sixties looking for another way. Richardson Bay was a dumping ground then — abandoned boats left to rot in the mud flats, rusting shipwright warehouses on the shore. Not valuable. Not desirable. Exactly the kind of place people with nothing to lose could make something. Communities sprang up on the hulks. Issaquah, SS Vallejo, Gate 6, Galilee Harbor. People building homes out of what the city had thrown away, which is its own kind of poetry.

Living free was not something the rich wanted to see when they looked down on the bay. Cue the still ongoing Houseboat Wars.

In 1971 the sheriff started moving. They’d wait until people went ashore for groceries or fresh water then tow the boats to breaking yards while they were gone. The hippies fought back with axes and boat hooks and shotguns, chasing deputies away from their neighbors’ homes. One morning bulldozers came for the warehouses on shore. A mother and daughter were sleeping inside. They didn’t make it out.

That’s when the lawyers came.

Fifty years later Galilee Harbor still exists in a legal gray area, locked in a battle that never quite ended. You can live there for now. That’s the best anyone can say. The city never stopped wanting them gone — it just changed its methods. No more bulldozers. Just bureaucracy. The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission made it official: no more than ten percent of slips at any marina could be liveaboards. Ten percent. Precision cruelty dressed up as regulation.

This is what I was joining when I brought the Famiglia Santa across Richardson Bay. Not just a marina. A resistance. A fifty year argument about who gets to decide how people live.

That’s what the hippies at Galilee had learned in the sixties. You don’t fight the system head on. You find the cracks. You help each other find them. You become necessary to each other in ways the bureaucracy can’t account for.

I didn’t know that’s what I bought with the boat. Learning history not taught in schools by bearded anchor outs and barefoot grandmothers.

This life was not all placid introspection. I’d lived in San Francisco long enough to gather a band of friends, and they were just as curious about my new life as the tourists. We sailed and rowed on the bay in small boats during the day. I’d point out new friends in their half-derelict liveaboards. At night too many people crowded onto the small deck, music playing, passing homemade grappa I’d traded for letterpress work. People came out of the woodwork to see what this life was like so they didn’t have to dare take the risk themselves. They could dip a toe in.

The oddity of it attracted the press. Magazine articles. Eventually a feature in a German book about artists’ living spaces. It was the first real publicity I’d gotten and it went to my head. I fell in love with a woman who came to see the boat with her friends. I was living a storybook life. I thought I’d given everything up when I moved off dry land but I’d gained so much more.

Or so I thought.

Most of those people eventually left. Maybe the novelty wore off. Maybe I started believing my own fairy tale and became insufferable. Either way I was stripped back to bare bone again. I remember the night clearly. Staring at the darkness of the bay. The cold black silhouettes of Angel Island and Alcatraz. The brilliant orange hue of the Golden Gate Bridge. Wanting to either end it all there or start the engine and see how far I could get before the sea swallowed me whole.

My break came in an email from Heath Ceramics. They’d seen the magazine interviews, picked up on what I was saying about modern craft, and it aligned with their ethos. They were opening a new tile factory in the Mission District and wanted to offer me a studio space. I was nervous to commit. I had nothing else to lose. I said yes.

I moved the Famiglia Santa to the commercial fishing docks in San Francisco. Another loophole — the boat’s commercial fishing license and her age qualified her as an aesthetic fixture, which kept the fees low and the harbormaster quiet. I left Galilee Harbor behind for rougher neighbors. Gone were the views of Richardson Bay, the communal garden, the old salt crusted hippies. My view now was rusty fishing boats and a cold storage shed behind a fish market.

But the fishermen were something else. Long greasy hair. Knives or guns on their hips. Tattoos down their necks and hands. Outlaws, bikers at sea. They minded their own business completely. But if you needed a hand they were there. Nothing more to it than that.

The Dolphin Club filled the rest. A historic swimming and rowing club nearby — bay water, a sauna, group meals almost every night. These people hadn’t chosen to live together. They chose to come together day after day for cold water and shared food. A chosen family without the pressures of communal living. I saw joy in the face of the cook serving the food. That’s not nothing. That’s everything.

These two communities held me up without knowing it. I was heartbroken, broke, halfway out of my mind building out a studio that would fill my cup for the next decade — I didn’t know that then. What I felt was that someone had thrown me a life ring while I was treading water.

All I had to do was swim to shore.

The Famiglia Santa was there at every step. I cared for her the best I could. Not just the backdrop to that chapter of my life — she was the host. I eventually had to sell her. The studio needed the money and I couldn’t afford the upkeep. She passed through a few more owners after me.

Then one day I received a photo from Heather. The Famiglia Santa submerged at her dock. Bow buried in the Sausalito mud. She sank just before her hundredth anniversary. I never learned why she went down or what her ultimate fate was.

My heart sank when I saw that photo. I sat there tearing up, filled with all the grief and joy of the time she carried me across the bay and into a brighter future.

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“The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”
― Masanobu Fukuoka, The One Straw Revolution

This is a perpetual garden.
Under grayed arbors 
concentric circles 
Stand guard 
Around apple trees.

Comphry, balm, chard
Let them shoot up,
go to seed,
And lay down.
To feed the snails. 
Try and welcome death into this garden
And she’ll bring Spring.
This is the one straw revolution.

Apples, calendula, borage.
Morning raspberry exercises.
Sharing land, cider press, work truck.
White smoke.
Oil and wood burning.

This is indeed a post industrial landscape.
2000 year old trees, 
cut down 100 years ago,
And again and again.

Rail lines
Along gray-walled coast.
Steam boats 
In the dog-holed harbors.
Saw mills
At wide river’s end.
They are still alive in me. 

What did we do?
This wild violence to the world.
She holds these acts in 
each wooden ring and lichen spotted rock. 

Fir, tan oak, redwood
Fill our small stove
Cracking with fire warm.
I’m dreaming of the forest.

But I’m wide awake 
Tending the wild and tending this heart.
Remembering,
This was not wilderness, this was a garden.
And so am I. 

Living in this land,
but not as they had.
I will grow towards the sun,
and seed,
and lie down,
and feed the next Spring.

-jlt

I think about this picture a lot these days. My grandfather and me on the Christmas tree farm where I grew up. Working with my hands as he did. My hands in red New Jersey clay soil, planting trees. It's taken all this time to come back to what really matters - this personal history of land and the people who tend it. A perpetual garden. Reseeding itself, generation after generation.

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It’s now deep winter on the northern California coast. We’ve been settling into it like getting into bed after a long day. The rain comes and the smell of wood smoke drifts low in the valleys and hangs in the fields like specters. The moss seems to grow abundantly. Mushrooms spring up from under the redwood duff. Streams start flowing that have laid dormant for the summer months.

Winter means rain up here. Winter means being a little more solitary. Indoor activities. Soul-searching activities. That hard inner work is done mostly in the winter for me. The world feels like a cave I’m retreating into. Like Bodhidharma. Like an Irish hermit taking up residence in a stone beehive cell. This is my winter monastic life.

It means more writing. It means more introspection. Sometimes it leads to dark thoughts, but I’ve been getting better at pulling myself out of them over the years. Sometimes I think about how things were and I regret them. These are some of my darkest thoughts. Friends that I used to have or used to see all the time and now no more. It’s easier to leave people if I move away or in extreme cases a friend dies. It’s hard for sure, but, there’s also something beautiful about loving someone who has died. That grief is just the wrapping of a core of love that was there.

I think about those old friends that have left all of a sudden on their own volition though. These losses sting the most. Not because these people are gone from my life, but the nagging question of what happened? There’s no one else there to have the conversation with so the guesses cycle over and over through my mind. Misunderstandings, conflicts. Who knows. All I know is that some friendships cannot survive conflicts, so maybe, they were never friendships at all.

What is this world without conflict and repair? In the Zen Monastery there’s a saying, “monks are like rocks in a bag, they polish each other”. This stuck with me when I first heard it. Some people refuse to polish. I can’t hold it against them. I know they can’t escape though. The world is conflict. Pushing it aside, pretending that “it’s all good” doesn’t really cut it. Resentment builds up. Conflict becomes bigger, and eventually, something snaps, breaks.

Good friendships survive conflict. My friend Tom could really get under my skin sometimes. I really loved him, but he had this intense personality. We were working on a design project together and we hit a rough patch. I texted him something like “you’re acting like a dick”. I’ll never forget what he did when he read that, he called me. He could have texted back and that text could have been misunderstood in a thousand ways. He could have never spoken to me again. Many people would have taken that route after I lashed out, but he called me. “Hey, what’s going on, are you ok?” That concern disarmed me. I felt like he cared. From that point on we deepened our friendship because we knew we could trust each other. Conflict and resolution was tied into our trust.

A few years later, when Tom was in the ICU dying of congestive heart failure, I was there by his side on his last night alive. It took about a year for Tom to actually get to this point. A year of lingering in death. That year was hard for all of us who were friends with him, and in this moment it was a sense of relief and great sadness. When I was sitting there holding his hand as he was preparing to let go, I realized I was about to lose a friend that had shown me what true friendships are really about. Compassion for each other when we are at our lowest. Tom was there for me when I was at that point, and now, I was there for Tom.

During these winter storms the coastal wind pushes its way through the trees. I hear the rain on the tin roof. I stare into the flames of my wood stove and think about Tom holding that phone to his ear instead of firing back a text. Me holding his hand in the ICU. All those years between of showing up for each other when it mattered. The people who ghosted me - they’ll never know what they walked away from. They’ll have other friends, maybe good ones. But they won’t have this. They won’t know what it feels like to build something that lasts all the way to the deathbed. I can’t get back the time I spent on people who left without a word. All I can do now is pay attention to who stays when things get hard, and honor the ones who did.

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This is the first of ten precepts I vowed to maintain when I was lay ordained in Zen Buddhism. I think about this precept often.

From what I’ve been told, “first of ten” doesn’t mean it’s the most important, nor are the precepts supposed to be like the Ten Commandments. They’re not prescriptive like that. They’re like boundary markers in a channel in a river, hopefully guiding the follower toward what is called enlightenment in Zen, or perhaps just a quieter, easier life in the lay world.

When I took my vows, I repeated after my teacher: “not to kill.” This seems pretty straightforward - not to kill any living being. But it’s a harder rule to follow the more we think about it. Does “not killing” mean not squashing a spider or a bug? Does it strictly refer to more sentient beings like humans, perhaps whales or dolphins? Maybe it refers to not eating meat at all, though I think that would be more explicit.

Even if we ate only vegetables, we would still be killing things, and I’m not just meaning we would be killing plants. I mean the byproduct of farming a vegetarian diet is the act of killing other animals to protect your crops - whether it be bugs, perhaps a deer caught in a fence, or gophers. These things are almost necessary in any farming scenario.

Now I’m not trying to explain away the seriousness of this precept, nor am I condemned to Buddhist hell if I don’t follow these precepts, even though there is a Buddhist hell. If I don’t follow these precepts, it’s going to be a lot harder in my life to see the truer picture that Zen tries to show us: that everything is connected.

The Problem at Tassajara

This is where I want to start my story. As some of you know, I volunteer my time at Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery in the Big Sur wilderness. I work mostly as Work Leader, managing about 100 volunteers as we prepare for the summer guest season following a long winter Practice Period of intense Zen training.

Like a lot of human dwellings in the middle of nowhere, we have a rodent problem there. I think because it’s been a Buddhist monastery since 1967, these rodents were either ignored or captured alive for a very long time. With the scare we’ve had in California with the Hantavirus in 2025, Tassajara started to take things a little more seriously - or more aggressively.

I volunteered my services to research how to get rid of these rodents, and I want to share with you some techniques I found that really work. A lot of these techniques include killing them, which I also want to talk about because, as I mentioned before, we can’t go through life without killing things. Unfortunately, it’s this paradox that we have to live with.

So, how do I kill as a Zen practitioner? With my eyes fully open.

Know Your Enemy, and you will Know Peace

Rodents are not all alike. Generally, mice are a little less smart than rats, and not all rats are made the same way. There are beautiful native Wood Rats that live in California and build dens that are passed down through generations. These are not really the rodents I want to get rid of.

Unfortunately, the smartest rodent that we have at Tassajara is the Brown Rat, or the Norwegian Rat. As the name suggests, this species is native to Europe and came over on ships. I have no idea how it got to Tassajara, but this is the same common rat you would find in the sewers of New York or any other major city. They’re really smart. They have a hierarchy. They can learn complicated systems. Saying all this doesn’t make me feel better about killing them, but it is the reality of the situation.

When I wanted to learn more about these creatures, I did what most people in 2025 do: I went to YouTube. Fortunately, YouTube has amazing rat and mice catching videos. One of the main folks doing this work is Shawn Woods, who reviews and posts videos about different methods (links below). He does spare us the details of what happens, but he has really good advice, and I learned a lot about rat psychology from his videos. I also learned about some really good products which I’ll share with you.

The other thing I found was a New York Times Wirecutter episode called The War Against Mice (link below), which was really illuminating because it dove into rat psychology and hierarchy. The species will send out the younger generation first to scout out what is food and what isn’t. If the younger rats don’t come back, the larger rats won’t eat from that food source. As I said before, they’re really smart.

What I learned is that you have to gain their trust. Catching them isn’t the problem - there’s a lot more to it than that. Rodent control is a multi-pronged endeavor.

The Way has many Paths

• 1. Identify the Problem

First, identify what you’re dealing with. Is it mice or rats? How many? Where are they nesting? What are they eating? It could be they’re just coming in for warmth in winter, looking for shelter. Understanding the scope helps you choose the right approach. You can usually identify how many and what they are by the droppings they leave behind.

• 2. Seal Entry Points

Keep them out. This is easier said than done because mice can basically flatten themselves to squeeze through tiny gaps, but most of the time you can see where they’re coming in. That might be the threshold of a door or a hole in the wall. These two things are easy enough to fix.

At Tassajara, we have many skilled woodworkers who can patch a door pretty quickly and easily. For you at home, you might want to get some steel wool to stuff in a hole, then put some expanding foam over that hole to deter them. They will chew through foam but they don’t like to chew through steel wool.

• 3. Take Away Resources

This is really important. At Tassajara, we have a lot of food, although you never see any rodent droppings in the kitchen - most of the activity is around the garden, which you can’t really help, and also around the trash, which is more easily deterred.

Before I came, trash was usually stored in trash bags in a screened-off section underneath the deck. This was fine to keep trash away from the guests and bigger animals, but it is a perfect buffet for rats that could slip through the screen into the area. What we did was purchase heavy-duty plastic garbage containers with tight-fitting lids, which denied access to every rat and mouse that was getting into our trash.

• 4. Take Away Their Shelter

When we’re coming out of winter in the monastery, I usually find rodent activity in a far-away closet that hasn’t been opened in a long time, or a building that was not occupied all winter. This has to change before guest season - there might be some unwanted visitors in there, which is not good.

Generally, opening up and cleaning areas that were used by the rodents all winter helps. They have a really good sense of smell, so sensing that a human is back in the area sometimes deters them from entering that area again. There’s a Buddhist concept in this - giving them a chance before you go toward the ultimate solution.

• 5. Birth Control

This is kind of a new concept, and it might be a little far-fetched still, but there are some products out there that, when ingested by a rodent, act as birth control. This is really interesting because we’re not necessarily killing the rodents quite yet - we’re feeding them a delicious meal filled with contraceptives, so hopefully these prolific little critters won’t be able to have offspring. Because we’ve taken away their main source of food, they have no choice but to eat this product.

• 6. Attack from the Above

One of the best defenses against rodents is one of their natural predators: owls. The more open space you have around the area where you’re having problems, the better. Owls are active in open spaces at night when rodents are most active.

If you’re living deep in the woods, this is going to be a problem. But if you have the option to clear some trees around your house, which you should be doing anyway in the state of California due to wildfire risk, this might be a good option for you. It’ll also promote some local wildlife habitat.

Right Action in the Face of Death: Lethal Products

• Poison

I found Rat-X non-toxic poison really effective. This turns off their thirst receptors, and they die of severe dehydration. It seems really cruel, but it’s a method that works. Because the bait is fully digested, it won’t be transferred to predators that might eat a dead rat. This is an effective method, but it’s not my favorite.

• Bucket Trap

I really like this one a lot. That YouTuber I mentioned before, Shawn Woods, has great videos on this. It’s a mousetrap where the rat climbs up a ramp to a 5-gallon bucket. At the end is a teeter-totter with bait. The rat goes on the teeter-totter, tries to get the bait, drops in the bucket, and the ramp resets itself.

This is a great trap because it’s low-tech, resets itself, and there’s no recurring cost. I also like this trap because you don’t necessarily have to kill the rodents you’re catching - they can just drop into the bucket, and you can take them somewhere and empty them out in the morning.

You could also fill the bucket up with water and have them drown, which I think is really cruel and don’t recommend

• Snap Traps

This method is really preferred by experts I’ve listened to, and I’ll tell you why. Because rats are so smart, we need to gain their trust, as I said before. So we feed the rats for about a week or two with kill traps that you can bait but not set.

After that initial trust-building period, we set all the traps. This is one of those nights where you’re going to have to drink some coffee because you’re going to be checking these traps almost every hour. I guarantee you that the first hour after dark, you’re going to catch the biggest rats - because once you gain their trust, they push the smaller rats out of the way and go for the food.

Once you clear the traps of the bigger rats, you go back, reset them, and you’re going to get generation after generation, until you get to the smaller rats that won’t set off the most traditional snap traps. This is the major flaw I found in this method.

• Fancy Traps: The Goodnature A24

I really like this one, and it’s brand new. It’s from Goodnature, called the A24, and it’s a CO2-powered trap that you mount on the wall. It works for both rats and mice, and you can use the trust-building method by not putting in the CO2 cartridge at first.

The rat is hit by something reminiscent of a cattle stunner, drops to the ground, and the trap resets itself. One strike, one kill, little to no suffering. The only problem with this trap is that each one costs about $100, and you have to buy CO2 cartridges.

Killing with Full Awareness

Now you might be asking: this just seems like a review on how to catch rats and mice, but where’s the Zen view?

What I mean by that is you’re going to try every method before killing, but you’re going to have to kill some. And you’re going to have to kill with full awareness that you’re taking a life. You’re killing a rat mother or a rat father or a rat child. But you’re also probably saving human lives by doing this.

Be fully aware of what you’re doing. Don’t treat them with disrespect.

In the morning, after I gather the bodies of the rats from the traps I set the night before, I gather them in a bucket and take them to a place where we usually bury all the past pets - quite a far-off place at Tassajara, on the edge of the monastery, approaching the 200,000-acre wilderness.

I place the bucket on the ground and bow to the bucket and the bodies of the deceased. I empty the bucket on an old tree stump and bow to the bodies three times. There’s no talking. There’s no laughing. There’s no satisfaction in killing these beings. There’s just honor and respect.

Living with Paradox

This is the way I’ve come to terms with the act of killing at a Zen monastery. I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone, but hopefully, I can give you some tips on taking a life with our eyes fully open.

This is also a lesson with many things in our lives: doing dishes, sweeping, chopping wood, and sending an email. If we just put down the headphones, turn off the TV, and really pay attention to what we’re doing, we can be actively involved in this world and take full responsibility for our actions.

I don’t think killing will ever end, but I do believe that full awareness is a form of peace, and peace will prevail.

-----

Resources:

More about Tassajara Work Period

Shawn Woods’ Mousetrap Monday Videos

Wirecutter: How to Win the War Against Mice

Traps and Products (I’m not sponsored by any of these)

Rat Birth Control

The Rat Bucket Trap

RatX Bait

Goodnature A24 Trap

I really like the term “vocation”. Unlike a career or a job, a vocation literally means “a divine calling”. Listening to that calling takes some skill. There’s societal pressure to pursue a job that will make us the most money with the least amount of effort. I’m not blaming anyone. This is capitalism 101. However, vocation doesn’t operate in that same world. A vocation doesn’t take into account a retirement fund or effort to produce. It goes beyond.

When I was about 10 years old, I had a divine calling. I told my parents I wanted to be a priest. I remember being drawn to the awe and splendor of mass, and also the connection to the unseen. I wanted to serve as a bridge between the spiritual and material worlds. That calling transformed over time, and found a different form. I became an artist instead and it took me years to realize how similar these vocations actually are.

Society tends to see artists as entertainers, decorators, or self-indulgent people making luxury goods for the wealthy. But I think we’ve forgotten something essential about what artists actually do. Artists are a bridge between worlds.

We Are the Bridge Between Worlds

I once attended a lecture by occultist Carl Abrahamsson on art and magic in Copenhagen. He spoke about how artists have always held a special place in society. For a very long time, artists served the role clergy would. This was before the church assumed control over connecting the masses with the divine. Artists were the ones who painted megafauna in caves to induce transcendental experiences. They were the ones that lived on the outside of average society, one foot in one world, one foot in the next. Artists still are, even if we’ve forgotten to acknowledge it.

Abrahamsson writes about “magical externalization” - the process of bringing what’s internal and invisible into external, visible form. This is exactly what spiritual practice does, and it’s exactly what art does. Making the unseen seen. Giving form to the formless. Creating bridges between consciousness and matter. What the ancient Greeks termed “Logos”.

And here’s the remarkable part: this isn’t just philosophical speculation. Barbara Nerness, a scientist at Stanford and sound artist, has researched the neuroscience behind this connection. Alpha brainwaves, with a frequency range of 8-12 Hz, appear when we’re in a relaxed yet focused mental state, serving as a bridge between the conscious and subconscious mind.

Research shows that alpha brainwaves play a crucial role in facilitating spiritual experiences. The same brain state occurs during meditation, mindfulness practice, transcendental experiences, and art-making. When you’re meditating, praying, or creating art, your brain is doing the same thing - bridging the conscious and unconscious, connecting you to something larger than yourself.

This isn’t metaphor. It’s measurable. Art-making literally produces the same brain states as spiritual practice.

What if I told you, this summoning can be done by any of us if we are dedicated enough to try?

In *What Artists Do*, Leonard Koren offers a radically democratic definition that reinforces this: “Anyone can be an artist. There are no tests to take, no certification required, and no particular skills needed.” He explains that artists create from a subjective point of view - this is what I see, what I feel, what I believe, what I question. Every artist formulates their own problems to solve and sets their own criteria for success.

This democratization of artistic practice mirrors another historical moment: the Protestant Reformation. Before the Reformation, the Catholic Church controlled access to spirituality. You needed priests, Latin, and institutional approval to have a relationship with the divine. The Reformation said no - everyone can have direct access to God.

Letterpress printing has always been the artistic equivalent of this revolution. Letterpress is the people’s art. It democratized the written word. It made ideas accessible to everyone rather than keeping them locked in elite spaces. Just as the Reformation put scripture in people’s hands, letterpress put the creative power to express themselves in the people’s hands.

This is why art that truly serves its function is threatening to existing power structures. When art connects people directly to transcendence, to meaning, to transformative experiences - when it gives spirituality directly to the people - it bypasses the gatekeepers. The people in power don’t want that. They want to control access to spiritual experience.

The Gatekeepers

However, our modern way of interacting with art is echoing the Catholic church’s spiritual power grab. Art has become a hierarchical pyramid scheme. Let me explain.

We can see control mechanisms operating in multiple ways today. The contemporary art world often requires MFA degrees and gallery representation to be taken seriously as a “legitimate” artist. But this gatekeeping is bad for art in the same way the Church’s monopoly on scripture was bad for spirituality. It limits who gets to participate and serves the interests of the powerful rather than the people.

Art school credentials reinforce class divisions. MFA programs cost a fortune, so “legitimate” artist status becomes accessible only to people with generational wealth, which is itself a form of universal basic income, just not universal at all. Working-class people making incredible art in their communities get dismissed because they lack institutional credentials.

Look at how money flows into spaces that should be about transformation - public sculpture, Burning Man, the contemporary art market. The money doesn’t enhance their spiritual power; it diminishes it. The focus shifts from transformative experience to spectacle, from sacred encounter to market value or even a tax write-off.

Even AI-generated images, technically proficient as they might be, miss the essential point. Without genuine spiritual seeking, without that alpha wave state of consciousness bridging worlds, it’s producing objects that look like art but aren’t fulfilling art’s deeper function. Like commodified contemporary art, AI generation can be skillful but spiritually hollow.

The system wants art commodified, contained, turned into investment vehicles or content or status symbols - anything but its actual function of connecting people to something larger than the systems that control them.

The Impossible Position

But here’s the brutal truth: our duty as artists isn’t just to make spiritual work or resist commodification. Our duty is also to survive in a world where our healthcare isn’t guaranteed, and our housing isn’t secure. That’s a massive burden.

The system seems designed to break us - to force us to either compromise the spiritual integrity of our work by commodifying it, or to struggle so much with basic survival that we can’t focus on the deeper calling. I don’t think art can truly progress until artists can meet Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Right now, artists either treat their spiritual work as a product to sell, or they come from generational wealth that allows them to make “pure” art without worrying about rent. This means the art world gets dominated by privileged voices, while working-class artists and marginalized communities - the very people who most need art’s transformative power - are least able to create it freely.

The spiritual function of art gets filtered through class privilege, which completely undermines its democratic potential.

A Proposal

So what is our duty as artists in this rigged system?

We make the work anyway. We find ways to democratize access where we can. We support other artists when possible. We resist commodification where we can, even knowing we can’t resist it completely. We name the system honestly so people understand that struggling artists aren’t failing - they’re fighting an uphill battle against forces designed to control and contain art’s spiritual power.

But I think we also need to make a more radical argument: Art needs space from commercialization. Artists need subsidies. And perhaps most provocatively: artists should be treated like religious organizations.

Churches don’t pay taxes because society recognizes their spiritual service has value beyond market economics. If artists serve the same bridge function between worlds - and the neuroscience proves we do - then why shouldn’t we receive the same protections and support?

The current system wants to pretend art is just entertainment or luxury goods. But it’s not. Art is essential spiritual infrastructure that society needs to support, just like we support religious institutions, education, and public health.

We can’t put a price on prayer or meditation or access to the divine without corrupting their function. Similarly, we can’t fully commodify art’s true purpose without destroying what makes it valuable. Yet we let the people who maintain this spiritual infrastructure starve. We treat this essential work as less important than organized religion, even though it serves the same function.

We need to reclaim that understanding.

This is the artist’s duty: to insist that making things is still a bridge between worlds, even when the market wants to reduce it to content. To resist capitalism’s colonization of our spiritual function. To keep creating spaces where people can access transcendence directly, without gatekeepers or institutional approval or market value determining what’s legitimate.

The power is still ours, we just need to remember it is.

I miss my old life sometimes. Not all of it, but parts. The recognition. The sense of knowing who I was. “The letterpress guy” - that was easy to explain, easy to hold onto. As you might know, by reading my previous essays, I gave it up intentionally, sold the shop, stepped away to pursue something I believed was more important: community, connection, a life less bound to capitalism’s demands.

But knowing you made the right choice doesn’t stop the grief.

This whole year has been full of hurt in ways I didn’t anticipate. The loss of expertise that people could see. The loss of control. The loss of being somebody to being nobody again.

I intentionally wounded myself, and the wound won’t heal. Maybe it’s not supposed to.

My therapist and I talk about Chiron - the wounded healer from Greek mythology. Chiron was a centaur, a teacher, a healer who could cure others but carried a wound that would never heal. For a long time, I thought healing meant closing wounds, making them go away. But maybe Chiron’s story is teaching us something else: that some wounds are meant to stay open. That our unhealed places are exactly what make us useful to others.

The wound is grief- the grief of intentionally ending something. The grief of time moving forward when part of you wants to go back.

I work and live in Northern California now. On the wild Mendocino coast, among the redwood forests. If you look closely at these trees, you can see the history written in the stumps - the massive old growth that was clear-cut over a century ago, and again in the 1950s, and at some point, a wildfire rolled through. The wound in the land is still visible. You can stand on the charred stumps wide enough to build a cabin on and feel the loss of what was here before.

But the forest didn’t stop. New trees grew up around the stumps, through them, despite them. The wound became part of the ecosystem. The grief is still there, but life continues anyway. Not instead of the wound, but with it.

As a kid with learning disabilities, on the spectrum, I knew what it felt like to be looked through. To know that adults couldn’t see because I didn’t fit their idea of what smart looked like. Building the shop gave me ten years of visible expertise, a decade where I didn’t have to prove myself anymore. Giving that up meant choosing to return to that vulnerable space where your knowledge doesn’t count, where you have to start over.

I didn’t realise how much that would hurt.

At a previous job, I’d try to contribute from decades of experience and get assigned busy work instead. This has happened countless other times in my life after the shop. The humiliation of being looked through again, of feeling transparent - I thought I’d left that behind with childhood.

But maybe I needed to feel it again, not as punishment, but as a connection.

Because now, when I sit with someone who’s grieving their old identity, who misses what they intentionally left behind, who feels invisible in their new life - I know exactly what that feels like. Not theoretically. Actually. The wound is still open in me, too.

As a cis man who is white, I’ve had privileges I didn’t earn. I’ve been seen and heard in ways many people never are. This transition gave me just a taste of what marginalised communities live with daily - having your expertise dismissed, being looked through, having to prove yourself over and over. It’s not the same experience, not even close. But it opened my eyes to dynamics I’d been blind to before. My brief encounter with invisibility helped me recognise what others endure constantly.

The wound becomes the credential. Not because I’ve healed, but because I know what this territory feels like. I can sit with someone in their grief without trying to fix it or rush them through it. I can say: this really hurts, and it’s supposed to. You’re not doing it wrong. Time only moves forward, and you can’t go back, even when you want to. And that’s part of it too.

When my grandmother died, I wrote a poetry book called *Hold This Close*. Grief has always been a creative force for me - not something to overcome, but something to work with, to shape into meaning. This current grief, the grief of self-imposed transformation, is teaching me the same lesson again.

How will I use this grief?

I’m learning the answer isn’t to heal it or transcend it. It’s to stay in relationship with it. To let it connect me to others who are hurting. The wound stays open, and that’s what makes it useful.

Everyone going through transition carries this wound. The person who left a prestigious career. The one who ended the marriage. Anyone who’s chosen to become nobody after being somebody. We’re all grieving identities we intentionally walked away from.

And we’re all learning what the redwood forest teaches: the wound doesn’t go away. You can see where the devastation happened. But new growth comes anyway - not despite the wound, but with it.

I chose grief when I stepped away from being “the letterpress guy.” Now I’m learning to use that wound the way Chiron did - not by healing it, but by letting it make me useful to others who are hurting too.

The forest keeps growing. The wound remains. Both things are true.

Under grayed arbors

concentric circles

Stand guard

Around apple trees.

Comphry, balm, chard

Let them shoot up,

go to seed,

And lay down.

To feed the snails.

Try and welcome death into this garden

And she’ll bring Spring.

This is the one straw revolution.

Apples, calendula, borage.

Morning raspberry exercises.

Sharing land, cider press, work truck.

White smoke.

Oil and wood burning.

This is indeed a post industrial landscape.

2000 year old trees,

cut down 100 years ago,

And again and again.

Rail lines

Along gray-walled coast.

Steam boats

In the dog-holed harbors.

Saw mills

At wide river’s end.

They are still alive in me.

What did we do?

This wild violence to the world.

She holds these acts in

each wooden ring and lichen spotted rock.

Fir, tan oak, redwood

Fill our small stove

Cracking with fire warm.

I’m dreaming of the forest.

But I’m wide awake

Tending the wild and tending this heart.

Remembering,

This was not wilderness, this was a garden.

And so am I.

Living in this land,

but not as they had.

I will grow towards the sun,

and seed,

and lie down,

and feed the next Spring.

A Perpetual Garden was written as part of a series called Notes from Albion Ridge which is my reflections of living on the wild northern California coast. It was sparked by a tour of Salmon Creek Farm by Fritz Haeg, in which Fritz described the method of gardening at the commune turned artist school and retreat space.

He mentioned One Straw Revolution as being influential. It advocates for a "do-nothing" approach to agriculture, which minimizes human intervention to work in harmony with nature.

SCF, like most of the coast of Northern California, was land that was clear cut of all the ancient redwood forests, not once but two or three times. This forest was not pristine wilderness before that but a garden as well. For 20,000 years the Pomo and other tribes managed the forest through burns and planting.

Thinking of the outer work connected with the inner, I wonder about how to tend to the garden inside. How do I harmonize it with the natural timeframe I have left on earth? When do I apply the fire?

-James

There was a stick she used to measure trees with. About eight feet tall and four inches wide, marked with paint every foot, hand-painted numbers between the lines. Ten dollars for a cut tree, twenty for one dug with the root ball. Such a simple item. It served a purpose, was made by hand, and I wonder where it is now. After the sale of the farm, the rich man next door razed the old metal barn and bought a barn kit from the Mennonites. Honestly, it’s a lot better than the metal barn, but I miss the old one. I don’t know if I would miss or remember the measuring stick if my grandmother had bought it from somewhere.

I kind of live my life like that now. One of my favourite things I own is a fish gaff, it’s this handmade craft object I found in the bilges of the 1926 fishing boat I used to live on. I think it was made from a chair leg and a bent and sharpened piece of thick wire, all lashed together with thick waxed three-ply twine. I keep it around to remind me of the barn, of the boat, and of the person who made it. It’s not a luxury, but it’s something really special.

Both tools were made to operate in systems that would eventually kill off both professions. The measuring stick served a small family farm that couldn’t compete when Christmas tree production consolidated and wealthy buyers turned farmland into estates. The fish gaff served an industry that collapsed under its own extraction—fisheries depleted by the relentless demand for more, always more. These tools outlasted the work they served, became relics of ways of living that capitalism made obsolete.

Is that economic system worth saving?

In Japan, they have a government program called Living National Treasure (ningen kokuhō) that preserves crafts as a keystone to Japanese heritage—sort of a living UNESCO site. The Japanese government subsidises master craftsmen who, in turn, take on apprentices and teach them their craft, keeping both the work and Japanese culture alive in an ever-changing world. Would that work in the US?

I was obsessed with living history museums as a kid for this reason. They seemed to preserve vocations that I didn’t see alive in the world outside the museum’s entrance. When I was a kid, I remember visiting the Plimoth Patuxet Museums, a living history museum of a 16th-century New England colony. I remember watching ceramics being made. It just made sense to me—taking earth, sculpting it, firing it, using the item within the immediate community. I couldn’t grasp how a world outside that system functioned. There were no face-to-face interactions. I was using the same objects millions of others had, made by faceless people working in poor conditions.

When I first moved to San Francisco, I got involved with the Maritime Museum. It was a great place to volunteer. I was responsible for maintaining the historic structures and boats, and I got to learn how to sail them. Without the museum, I knew these boats would no longer exist. They were mostly not yachts but working boats, now obsolete. Without government funding, our economic system would have cast them aside for more effective means to get goods to consumers.

Maybe these museums are the lifeline we need to preserve craft. Or maybe they’re just taxidermy.

I thought I’d found the answer. I ran a letterpress shop in San Francisco for ten years. I worked with major clients. I built a community, hosted exhibitions, and taught workshops. I made it profitable enough to pay employees. By every conventional measure, I succeeded.

But I couldn’t keep going. The margins were too thin, the pace too relentless, the compromises too many. COVID ground me down—keeping employees safe, keeping the business alive through lockdowns, wildfires, and uncertainty. I realised I’d spent years avoiding the rat race only to build my own. Even “successful” craft businesses under capitalism are just slower deaths.

I sold the shop in 2023. I survived longer than most, but survival isn’t the same as sustainability.

I tried the market solution—build a business, serve high-end clients, make craft work within capitalism’s rules. Japan has the government solution—subsidise masters, preserve traditions as cultural heritage. Museums have the preservation solution—maintain the tools and knowledge as historical artefacts, keep them alive through demonstration and education.

None of them fully work because they’re all trying to sustain craft within or alongside a system that’s fundamentally hostile to it. Craft requires a different relationship to time, growth, and value than capitalism allows. The pandemic revealed how difficult it is to step off that treadmill even temporarily, even when lives were at stake.

So I keep the fish gaff. I remember the measuring stick. I think about the letterpress I sold and wonder who’s using it now, whether they’re making it work better than I did, or whether they’re just grinding themselves down the same way.

I don’t know how craft survives this, or if it does. But I know what I’m doing with these objects, with these stories. I’m keeping a record. The fish gaff, the memory of that measuring stick, the letterpress I sold—these are evidence of what we had and how we lost it. Most people don’t want to see this. They want to believe the system works, or that individual choices can fix it, or that craft thriving in museum gift shops and luxury markets means craft is fine.

I’ve always noticed something different from most. Like I could peek behind the curtain and see the inner workings of the machine that we’re riding into the future. As a child, I was scared. As an adult, I’m defiant. Now, I feel like a witness. I’m documenting what it looks like when crafts fade away as everyday practice and become relics, luxury, and museum demonstrations.

I have proof. Here are the tools people made. Here’s how careful they were. Here’s what we lost. I keep the fish gaff not because I think that world is coming back. When the current system ends, and it will, we will need people who remember what it was like before. We need people who remember that craft existed at all.

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I’m a tramp, and I choose to be one. Now tramp has a lot of connotations but let me tell you what I mean by that: I’m a person who refuses to mask. Who refuses to plant a flag and claim territory. Who chooses impermanence and interdependence over ownership and empire-building. Being a tramp is stepping off the conveyor belt. It’s a political act, a rebuttal to the lies we’re being sold. That might sound self-involved, but it’s quite the opposite. Let me explain.

We’re sold this idea that freedom means going it alone. Building your empire. Your name on the door. Money and fame. But maybe that’s the biggest trap of all. There’s really no end to it. An advertised hamster wheel. There’s always a bigger fish and the grass is always greener. I know this because I used to be on the wheel and was told I succeeded, but it wasn’t actual freedom.

I used to have my own business. No one telling me what to do. I had the responsibilities of rent and more importantly employees. Their livelihood was on me, and I felt that weight every day. I moved to San Francisco with my grandfather’s army duffle over my shoulder and that was it. With lots of luck and hard work I was a householder. Balancing it all, like spinning plates in a circus. I was sort of comfortable but in the way of having nice shoes on and having a stone in one. Was this it? As a secret optimist, I didn’t believe so. There was something else out there and I needed to know. After a lot of thinking I decided to give it all up. To pick up the proverbial bundle stick and go out on the road. In search of what? I didn’t know. Maybe it’s my restless nature. I needed to find myself on the road again.

I think I first learned about Tramp Printers from my friend Chris Fritton, who had a project cum book called The Itinerant Printer. The project was him printing at multiple print shops in each state, spending some time there, making a print, and going on to the next. This is how we met. He came through San Francisco and spent a week at my shop making a print edition with me, which led into a whole series of prints. You can actually read in Chris’s book about how we bonded and became friends. I like when he wrote about how we were like Beat Poets. I felt that’s what we were like too. Making art during the day, and having fun at night. It was a good time.

Chris based The Itinerant Printer project on Tramp Printers from the past. These were letterpress printers that would ride the rails from town to town and pick up jobs, leave them after a week or two, and go onto the next print shop in the next city. I don’t know exactly what they carried - whatever fit on their backs, I imagine. Tools of the trade, maybe. References. A change of clothes. There was so much work back then you could travel from one end of the country to the next and never be out of work. I don’t know how they were received at each shop, but I like to think there was a camaraderie there. A shared understanding. You show up, you know your craft, you do good work, you move on. No strings attached. Just the work and the road. That’s what I thought I wanted, living that free and easy life.

But the truth is I was burnt out. COVID did a number on me like it did everyone. The shop, the employees, keeping everything alive through lockdowns and uncertainty - it ground me down. Did I avoid the rat race all my life, just to start my own? I wanted off the conveyor belt so I started looking for something else. Something more than just running a business. I went to Tassajara Zen Monastery for the first time and something shifted. The rhythm of communal life. Working alongside people toward something bigger than yourself. Waking up before dawn for meditation. The silence. The purpose. I realized what I was pursuing with my shop wasn’t really freedom, it was the bonds most of us find ourselves in. Real freedom is giving back, contributing to the greater good. To paraphrase a friend, choosing firewood for the next winter, a winter you won’t be there. That’s the freedom I wanted. I came back from Tassajara and looked at my shop differently. All those years building something that was just mine. Employees, sure, but it was my name on the door, my vision, my burden. I wanted something we built together.

A few years after The Itinerant Printer came out, I wound up selling my shop in San Francisco and setting out on my own in search of that communal freedom. I landed in Guerneville, caretaking land for a friend who’d recently purchased it as a second property. I became a sort of serf on this property, earning my rent for 25 hours of work a month. I started teaching very part-time at a high school. I still had connections to my old shop - teaching workshops there, staying involved - and I had a letterpress close by I could use if I got the hankering. Everything seemed good. I was building toward something.

I started pursuing this idea of living in community more seriously. I found a peer-led Zen group in Guerneville, Next Gen Zen. We practiced together. We led it together. We were in it together, or so I thought. For a while it felt like everything I’d been searching for. A sangha. A practice. People working on themselves, together. I thought I was doing a good thing. Thought I was following the dharma, a path much larger than myself.

Then it imploded. Friendships ended. Betrayals. Someone wanted control of something we’d all built together, and when I pushed back, everything fractured. I’ll call it a little cult because that’s easier than explaining how something so promising could turn so painful. Zen was a world I’d been entrenched in for years. A world I’d dedicated my life to, taken vows to pursue. It tore itself apart and I never saw it coming.

Around the same time, my arrangement in Guerneville ended - they wanted rent after all. My connection to my old shop ended too. Everything I’d been building, gone. I was back to square one and back on the road.

But I couldn’t give up. What went wrong wasn’t the idea of communal freedom - it was trying to make something permanent that should have been temporary. Or maybe it was the hierarchy that crept in when someone wanted control. I don’t know. But I knew the answer wasn’t to go back to isolation. I was onto something and I knew it was out there.

With the years of experience I had leading work retreats at Tassajara, I was hired at an artist residency to fulfill an interim residency coordinator role. I liked it there for the most part. 600 acres, a view of the Pacific, an hour from SF and an hour from Santa Cruz. No printing, but not bad. A community of artists coming and going, making their work. But that ended too, as these things do.

I really lucked out though. I landed a role at another artist residency on the wild coast of Northern California. This place seems like a good fit. A place that prioritizes community over convenience. It’s a ways away from any city. There’s composting toilets. There’s peer-led classes. In this place where misfits lead misfits, there’s room for me. That’s where the community I’ve been looking for exists - not a permanent sangha but a rotating cast of people passing through, each on their own journey. A different kind of sangha. Temporary but real. I’m one step closer to knowing what real freedom is.

Now travel two hours down to Sonoma County to use my press at North Bay Letterpress Arts - a community-based letterpress organization where I own a press but let the members use it. I serve on the board there. That’s my payment to the place. I go down there and print sometimes, but it’s not my home studio. It’s communal. Shared. This is what communal ownership looks like in practice - I have a press but it’s not really mine. It belongs to the community. I contribute my labor and my equipment, and in return I’m part of something bigger than myself. No name on the door. No empire. Just shared tools and shared purpose.

So what does this actually look like? How do you step off the conveyor belt without just building your own private treadmill? For me it’s meant: seeking communal living experiences, finding peer-led structures, owning things communally, embracing impermanence, contributing to things I’ll never see finished. It means giving up security, stability, maybe wealth accumulation. But these aren’t sacrifices - they’re releases. I’m not giving up freedom for community. I’m finding real freedom by letting go.

The old tramp printers had it figured out, I think. You show up. You do good work. You move on when it’s time. No strings. Just the work and the road and whatever community you find along the way, for however long it lasts. That’s the true tramp life. Community on the move. It’s realizing that everything is temporary. We can’t take anything when we leave, but what we leave behind is the good that we did in this world. We leave the community and connections that we built when we were here.

That’s the blueprint I’m still learning: Stop trying to own your freedom. Stop building monuments with your name on them. Show up. Do good work. Build something together. Move on when it’s time. Leave behind the connections, not the possessions. Chop the firewood for winters you won’t see. That’s freedom. That’s the tramp life. That’s the only system worth creating.

In 1439, Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press unintentionally democratized knowledge by making books affordable, disseminating information that led communities to question authority and ultimately sparked the Reformation. This revolutionary potential of printmaking as a tool for spreading new ideas and social transformation continued through numerous 18th and 19th century revolutions, small press publishing of the Beat Poets in the 1950s, the political posters of the Black Panther Movement, and even a push from big tech in our current era. For me, printmaking is not merely a medium for creating beautiful objects; it is a methodology for community building, democratization of art, and social change.

My artistic development has been shaped by observation of place, collaboration, and the intersection of printmaking with poetry and Zen Buddhist philosophy. I hold a BFA in Printmaking from Maryland Institute College of Art, but my real education came through founding and operating The Aesthetic Union from 2013 to 2023. Located in the Heath Ceramics tile factory in San Francisco’s Mission District, the shop was a design and print epicenter with clients including Eames Institute, Vitra, Andy Goldsworthy, JB Blunk, and Wonder Valley. It also became a vital hub for artists, writers, and the broader creative community. We offered workshops, hosted exhibitions, and created a model for artist-led spaces that prioritized accessibility and community engagement over profit. The success of The Aesthetic Union proved that smaller, flexible, artist-centered organizations can thrive when led by practitioners deeply embedded in their craft—not administrators managing from a distance.

During this period, I developed a dual practice as both printmaker and poet, producing many letterpress and relief editions and publishing my own book of poetry. I was influenced by generations of California artists who documented the state’s transformation from pristine landscape to developed American mainstream. William S. Rice’s Arts and Crafts relief prints, influenced by Japanese printmakers who immigrated to the Western United States, captured early California’s natural beauty. Robinson Jeffers created a California mythology through his poetry, while William Everson’s letterpress broadsides and poems carried the 1950s and 60s utopian movements into the stark reality of the twentieth century. Ed Ruscha’s art dramatically embraces Southern California’s urban expansion as the new Western landscape. Each of these artists maintained a strong spiritual foundation—a quality that resonates with my own practice of Western Zen Buddhism and its teachings about interconnection and the journey as the treasure. Following this lineage, my work uses printmaking’s capacity for multiples to democratize observation itself—creating editions that document transformation and make that documentation accessible across economic and geographic barriers.

One of my most significant recent works exemplifies this convergence of influences. Working with poet Genine Lentine, I created Fire Basin Sutra, an in memoriam broadside based on 12th-century Zen philosopher Dogen’s masterpiece Mountain and Rivers Sutra. Genine rewrote Dogen’s words through the frame of Zen teaching about cooking, and I conceived, designed, and letterpress printed the piece using a format based on lineage papers I received when ordaining as a Zen practitioner. The work served as a memorial for my good friend Tom Ingalls, a pivotal Bay Area designer and devout follower of Zen. This project represents everything I value: collaboration with poets, engagement with Zen philosophy, technical letterpress mastery, and creating meaningful work rooted in community and memory.

Since selling The Aesthetic Union in 2023 and relocating to coastal Northern California, I have shifted focus toward supporting arts organizations in transition—helping them find funding and develop income through workshop programming. I currently serve as Residency Manager at Salmon Creek Farm and previously as Artist Residency Coordinator at Djerassi Resident Artists Program, where I ensured that artists, 60% of whom are BIPOC and gender fluid individuals, arrive, live, work, and depart safely. I have made it my mission to create inclusive environments where marginalized artists feel safe and represented in a field still primarily run by wealthy, straight, white people. I also teach letterpress workshops at North Bay Letterpress Arts, where I serve on the board.

This work has shown me both the strengths and limitations of traditional arts institutions. While many legacy organizations were founded with good intentions, they often rest on their laurels, dependent on deep pockets and structures designed for different eras. I have witnessed what marginalized artists need that these models cannot adequately provide. The future of artist residencies and community arts spaces must be smaller, more flexible, more inclusive, and better at connecting artists to opportunities beyond just time and physical space. This vision cannot be realized through arts administration alone—it requires artist-leaders deeply embedded in their own creative practice who can build trust through shared experience.

My credibility with artists comes not from administrative roles but from being recognized as a working artist. The Aesthetic Union succeeded because it was artist-led by someone making work alongside the community, not because it was well-managed from outside. To effectively create the inclusive, community-centered arts organizations I envision—particularly in underserved rural areas—I must continue developing my artistic practice to its highest level while building organizational frameworks. I need to be in the work, not managing it from a distance.

Most of my work about place is rarely made in that place. I observe, take notes and sketches, step away, and bring it all back to my studio with time to gestate ideas. This practice of distance and reflection allows me to see transformation clearly—both in landscape and in community.

I am committed to using printmaking’s expansive possibilities—from traditional letterpress and relief printing to experimental forms that serve conceptual goals—as tools for community transformation. My practice traces lineage from historical revolutionary uses of print media while remaining open to how printmaking continues to evolve as a democratic medium in contemporary contexts.

My vision is to create artist-led spaces in rural areas where printmaking workshops, poetry, and mindfulness practices provide accessible entry points for marginalized communities to develop creative voices. These organizations will not replicate legacy institution models dependent on wealthy patrons, but will instead be smaller, more flexible, and designed from the ground up for the artists who have been excluded or poorly served by traditional structures. To build this future requires both artistic credibility that comes from rigorous practice and the organizational knowledge to sustain these visions long-term.

I want to explore how printmaking and poetry can work together to document and mythologize landscape transformation, continuing the lineage of California artists I admire while bringing my own lens shaped by Zen Buddhism and commitment to accessibility. Through sustained practice, critique, collaboration with like-minded artist-organizers, and deep engagement with both historical and contemporary approaches to democratic media, I aim to develop frameworks for creating inclusive community spaces that serve artists and communities who need them most.

The journey is the treasure, and I am committed to this path of making, teaching, and building spaces where art becomes a tool for transformation and belonging.