A week ago, I posted this:

Belonging is security
Becoming is freedom
We cling to the former
And long for the latter

The inspiration came a long time ago from Chinese American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan who in 1977 said: “Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other.”

My dad is a retired geography professor, so I’ve long thought about the relationship between people and place. My career has lived inside that question too, from reimagining a city’s relationship with an ephemeral river turned flood-control channel to watching the soil hold the hands of 2,000 gardeners each week.

My recent writing, including a poetry collaboration with Zen teacher Norma Wong, has been exploring the tension between belonging and becoming (see poetry offering in the postscript).

Then I went down a complete rabbit hole.

Belonging is holding on 
Becoming is letting go

Belonging is a wall 
Becoming is a window

Belonging is comfort food 
Becoming is fasting

Belonging is joining a friend 
Becoming is welcoming a stranger

Belonging is memory 
Becoming is imagination

Belonging is finding yourself 
Becoming is losing yourself

Then somehow I started to imagine what these words would look like. That’s when my good friend Monkey King came back.

How can I embody visually security and freedom?

How can this tension have a temporal feeling?

How can I both belong and become at the same time?

A few days ago, I saw this Thich Nhat Hanh quote and the binary tension between belonging and becoming evolved into something larger. He asked what happens when a wave remembers she is water?

I had been treating belonging and becoming as opposing forces: root or reach, security or freedom, holding on or letting go. But a wave does not have to choose between being water and becoming a wave. Its form changes. What it is does not.

And that took me down a rabbit space tunnel.

How can I reimagine this tension between belonging and becoming? The story of opposition is too binary. Too static.

How could I dance between the spirals of life and keep open to new horizons? The word beloving came to me. I don’t know if this is the right container to hold belonging and becoming. Or even if they want to be held. Either way, I am going to assume all of this gently.

Then, today, I reflected on my own journey.

For a long time I thought of myself as a bridge between races, cultures, sectors until I felt a bridge was too binary. Too static. There were always two sides, and somehow I was neither one.

As a kid, the box I checked on school forms was literally “Other.” It often made me feel invisible while everyone else seemed to belong to something unavailable to me.

Over time, I became less a bridge and more a dancer across places and spaces. I could cross boundaries.

And then not long ago I looked at a rainbow and saw a bridge. A colorful, ephemeral bridge. A bridge with no fixed sides. One that could appear and disappear.

Part of what makes a rainbow special is that it is present without being permanent.

We can root. We can reach. We can be reborn.

Life is regeneration. Life is living. Again and again.

But rebirth asks something of us. Something has to die. An identity. A certainty. A version of ourselves we thought we needed to keep.

I’m sure next week will be something different, and the same.

Cheers,

Omar🐒🌈

p.s. I just received a box of my poems in the mail. If you’d like a copy of Wholeness to Wholeness, let me know in the comments and I’ll send you one. The poems are free. If you’d like to help cover shipping and handling, you can make a contribution here.

p.p.s. This is the opening poem I wrote listening to Norma Wong give a series of talks on the Art of Waging Peace.

The Vessel

We begin 
In practice
Of breath
Together

Even if you’re pretending
To breathe
You’re pausing 
And interrupting 
What’s in your head

You are the vessel
To do the work
Conscious or
Reflexive

Othering and Belonging
Becoming and
Renewal
This is the season
To lean in
With spacious elasticity
To the phenomenon 
Of oscillation 

This is one of the realities
Of this moment
We are both Othering
And Belonging
As we wage peace

Waging 
Means we are doing
And Belonging
What do we do? 
To wage peace 
Who do we need to be
To wage peace?

I found this quote on my 16-year-old daughter’s bedroom wall:

How you spend your days is how you live your life.

It felt like a good reminder. And a good reason to check in.

In the end 
what mattered?

Did the logic 
Of your rightness 
Comfort you at night?
Did your days lead to the life 
You could thank before bed?

When did you last hear the squeal 
Of joy?
Was the ambition
Worth it? 
Was walking away 
Worth it? 

Mistakes were made

Can you ask for forgiveness
And do the work 
Of repair
With those you hurt
And those who hurt you?

Do you know in your bones 
Healing is real? 

We get this one glorious
Life
On this one precious 
Planet 

While the heat of change 
Presses 
There is still time 

To hug each other

With that unconditional
Love
Unbounded by logic

Where the practice of kindness
Outweighs
The need to be right

Kindly,

Omar🐒🫂

What to say 
But thank you
The click and clack 
Of my hiking sticks 
Poking a way forward
Through forests 
Mountain paths
Rocky scrambles and 
An unexpected river crossing
Left my left foot in doubled socks sloshing

Swishing backpack straps
30 pounds 
Not to speak of the extra 25 on me
Holding all that will hold me 
Sleeping bag, pad and tent
Water bottles 
Filled from high-mountain lakes 
With delicious sweet, cool melted snow 
Western winds blowing ripples 
At 8500 feet 
I untied your double knots
So I could plunge into  
The original cold bath 
At every chance
Snow still stuck in north-facing crevices 
Hiding from the August sun 

We crossed China Flats
Named for those who panned for gold 
Remote and on their own 
In 1849
Between two saddle passes 
Of Desolation Wilderness 
Under the towering pines
Scented dusty, hot
Sun-baked 
Ancestors crossed an ocean for this 

Shooting stars, making a wish 
And on this occasion 
Meteor showers streaked oohs and aahs 
Each night my breath caught up 
You didn’t judge
Last in our group of eight 
From almost 12 and a half in two weeks 
To my 52 years 
Plus two devoted four-legged companions, Oakley and Cleo

Three days, 23 miles 
You, my trusty boots 
Gave way 
Even mythical silver duct tape 
Couldn’t hold back time 
Your soles flapped in the wind 
I remembered our first meeting
At REI in Santa Monica
You fit perfectly 
Our first big climb 
To the top of Mt. Whitney 
I can still see the 360 view
Unobstructed 
A little more than 10 years ago 
Apparently I was told 
Soft equipment 
Is meant to retire in that time 

I’m glad you fell apart 
On this last trail
It gave me a final trial
2 miles to go
2,000 feet of descent 
In my sandals 
IT band in my right leg
Inflamed and in pain 
Mind focused
Take one more step
As I strapped you to my bag 
Following an instinct 
Footsteps echoing in the dirt 

Grateful for companions
Who eat out of mugs
Laugh at pooping strategies in the wild
After dinner of dehydrated packs
A friend, the one-who-needs-no-path, recalled his father 
Who took him with metal-framed backpacks 
And round canvas-covered canteens 
Out to the woods for the first time 
Even when the father would have preferred the comfort 
Of home

Because there is something 
Something 
We are meant to be 
At the edge of our breath 
Appreciating how a peanut butter sandwich
Dry with way too many seeds 
In the bread and the thinnest of jam 
Is manna fallen from the heavens 

Cheers,

Omar🐒🥾

p.s. On our drive home 
Winding through the Sacramento delta 
I ask my daughter what she’s learned from me
and will take with her to college
That just because a path is well trodden 
Doesn’t mean you should take it 

From her mom?
How to argue without making it personal. To separate the disagreement from the person. 

From her sister? 
Patience. Kindness….and love. 

Anyone else? 
Paw Paw. Generosity. 

“What are you feeling,” I asked my 84-year-old dad.

He started another story, as I lay on top of the guest bed and he sat on his walker. My teenage daughter Kenzie sitting with me, listening intently.

I interrupted him for what felt like the umpteenth time. “No, not another story. What are you feeling?“

“Loss,” he finally said.

“What does loss feel like?” I asked. “Does it have a physicality? Is it hot or cold?”

“It feels like there is a campfire with people huddled close to it. And I am far from the fire,” he said. “I’ve never felt like I was a part of the group no matter where I was.”

He had come in to share two dreams he had while at the hospital recovering from a second heart surgery.

The first dream was of a mountain and a path spiraled around it. He realized the same path could take him either up or down.

The second dream was of his body talking to him. It said that he had been following his monkey mind for a long time, and he now needed to listen to his heart and let his body lead.

“What was your monkey mind doing?” I asked.

“It was chasing something that was never there,” he said.

“What have you been chasing,” I asked.

“Like I belonged with a community,” he said, looking away.

There was a bittersweet irony to hearing my dad say this.

My two brothers and I shared one thing despite having different mothers: an absentee father.

Kenzie has maybe seen my dad four or five times in her 16 years. Yet, she insisted that we come to visit him in Topeka after his surgery.

My dad asked Kenzie how she felt, sitting in the room with him as he struggled to name his emotions.

“Sad,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes. And she went on to say to her grandpa, “and if you can’t see my dad, he wants to cry now too.”

She reached out to me, as my heart melted.

My dad started another story.

I interrupted him, again. “Don’t you see your granddaughter crying?”

He said he didn’t. Blamed old age, his sight, his hearing.

Kenzie slipped out of the room.

“I think we had enough for one night,” I told him.

I followed Kenzie to her bed and gave her a big hug. We held each other. Words were too hard to say out loud.

After some time, she asked, “How could he not admit his guilt? How could you not resent him?”

“I love who I am and I am who I am because of him too, even if he wasn’t there,” I replied.

She said, “you are who you are despite of him, not because of him.”

I could feel so much love bursting inside of me for my daughters. I’m not sure I’ve done anything better than to be their dad.

I wished my dad got to know this abundant love that can happen between a parent and a child. I wanted him, in however much time he has left, to know that he is worthy of love and to forgive himself.

The next morning he asked if we could go to breakfast, just the two of us.

Wonderful, I thought. He wanted to continue our conversation.

We sat at the table, set his walker to the side, and got our coffees.

For several minutes, he started talking to me about the history of agriculture and how economies of scale work.

Really?!?

I interrupted him. “Dad, I know how economics works. What I want to know is what you took away from last night.”

He paused. Then said, “I felt guilt. I didn’t know how to walk around it.”

“You know that was why Kenzie was sad. She was watching someone who couldn’t acknowledge their own role and agency,” I said. “You never said you felt guilty.”

“Well, I never said the word but it was woven into what I had to say,” he muttered.

“The words matter,” I pushed him.

I told him that I wanted him to feel the love he has in the time he has.

His wife has literally kept him alive: driving him to every hospital visit, pushing for second opinions, emptying the urinal bag they named Bilbo Baggins.

It’s the everyday practice of devotion that my dad’s monkey mind could never quite get right.

I said, “Dad, you’re so busy looking at all the campfires you missed in your life that you’re not seeing the ones that are right next to you.”

Cheers,

Omar🐒🔥

The breakfast was a massive buffet. One laid out opposite to the zen saying: eat the meal, not the menu. The coffee tasted like a menu.

There was a little cart with grass. Yayyyy, touch some grass. Nope. That’s plastic.

Humanity, in all its ingenuity, builds an ark, a floating city, and saves the mall.

Let me complete this rant.

Tierification.

If you’ve flown recently you know about tierification — no more first and economy. There is literally a different price for every seat. It costs extra if you want to sit with your kid, if you want the option to change plans, if you want your luggage to join you, if you don’t want to be the last person on and off the plane.

All to say, what makes life worth living when everything has a price?

Each night, our group of twelve came together in the main dining room, which rotated nightly themes from Italian to Caribbean. Interestingly, the best food, by consensus, was the Indian food, which appeared on the menu regardless of theme. My guess was that the chefs were simply cooking the food they knew from home, not a cookbook.

The next day, my oldest daughter Simone followed the same instinct. In Ensenada she led us off the tourist strip to a birria spot, filled mostly with locals. We ate four different types of birria tacos and could see the women handmaking the fresh tortillas. My youngest, Kenzie, observed that even going a little bit off the main drag gives you a completely different experience.

Real tastes different. The menu didn’t need pictures. You could smell the care in the open air kitchen.

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The head of Los Angeles County Public Works said this to me over lunch, beneath the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a monument to what counted as high culture when it opened in 1964: opera.

The Public Works director, a third-generation public servant, led one of the largest engineering depa…

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We were in the public library community room, maybe twenty of us in a circle, holding elections for new garden leadership. She had just been replaced.

I could feel the tension coming off her from across the room. I wasn’t close enough to the situation to know where the hurt originated. I only knew my job that night was procedural—keep the meeting moving, don’t let it become a forum for rehashing old arguments, get us to a vote so people could go back to governing themselves and gardening.

Everyone had come after a long hot day, and the room looked like the community itself: Armenian, Latino, Black. Grandmas and grandpas. A Gen Z gardener who volunteered to handle social media. A toddler who raised their hand for every vote.

Procedure became a friend that night. A tool that let the group stay in the same room as old wounds without reopening them.

I’ve recently been listening to a seven-part interview recorded six years ago with Dee Hock, the 91-year-old founder of Visa.

Hock grew up in a rural Utah community, worked in a slaughterhouse and a string of odd jobs, and eventually helped create the global payment network that became Visa. Yes, the card in your wallet.

But he doesn’t sound at all like a corporate executive. His inspirations are nature and philosophy.

Hock argued that modern organizations inherited a mechanistic worldview. Since the Industrial Revolution, modernity has imagined organizations as machines that work best when every part behaves predictably. Command and control rules the day.

What I have never seen work in any company, even ones where I was the leader, is the handling of conflict. Power plays. Disagreements. Outright undermining. I’m not sure I have ever experienced healthy conflict at work. Conflict was an error to eliminate. There was a bias to diagnose the problem, reduce friction, restore order, and get back to work. As if conflict was never part of the work.

In a mechanistic worldview, conflict is a malfunction. A machine is designed to produce predictable outputs. If two gears grind against each other, something is broken.

That logic produces familiar organizational habits:

• disagreement is inefficiency.

• deviation is error.

• ambiguity is weakness.

• emotion is noise.

• compliance is health.

But what if an organization isn’t best understood as a machine?

What if it is more like an organism?

It isn’t just a metaphor. Organization and organism share a root. Both trace back to the Greek organon: an instrument, a working part, the root of organ.

An organization was not originally imagined as a machine, but as an arrangement of interdependent parts. Something organized has organs—parts that live through their relationship to the whole. The mechanistic reading came later. The organic meaning was there from the beginning.

In an organism, conflict is often information. Pain tells the body something needs attention. An immune response isn’t a bug—it’s part of how the organism maintains itself. Muscles grow through tension. Forests regenerate through disturbance, including fire. Ecosystems are full of competition, cooperation, adaptation, and succession.

Hock said that data becomes information when it is assembled in a way that adds meaning. Specifically, he cites Gregory Bateson’s more poetic definition: information is “a difference that makes a difference.”

Conflict is a difference that makes a difference. You can feel it.

It doesn’t tell us who is right or wrong. It tells us that something important is happening. A boundary has been crossed. An expectation has gone unmet. A relationship has frayed. Something is asking to be understood.

That doesn’t mean every conflict should determine the direction of the community.

One of the hardest lessons of community leadership is that we rarely know what another person is carrying. Their anger has roots we may never see. The challenging part is when two different sides are both hurt, and curiosity and dignity seem out of reach.

At the same time, a community cannot become bounded by one person’s hurt.

I find myself having to hold this tension frequently.

As I listened to Hock, I began wondering whether gardeners already know something that organizations often forget.

Gardeners don’t cultivate plants. They cultivate the conditions in which plants can grow. What if leadership works the same way?

We spend so much time trying to solve conflict that we forget to cultivate the conditions in which conflict can become something else.

Right after the election, I walked from the library to the garden to look at some plumbing that needed fixing. The former leader was there too, still angry, pointing out everything wrong with the garden’s infrastructure. And how she had been wronged.

I’m not the most patient person. I could feel myself tiring of what I perceived as nitpicking—the same grievance, rerouted through a pipe fitting.

But a few other gardeners were already talking about a new day. Turning the leaf. Nobody said it like a slogan. It just showed up as people quietly deciding to fix what was broken instead of rehashing who broke it.

I laughed at a small metal sign wired to the fence.

TRESPASSERS WILL BE COMPOSTED.

Of course, it was meant as a joke.

But I began to read it differently. Every night, my family says the Lord’s Prayer:

Forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.

I have said those words a thousand times, always thinking what a strange wording. Trespassing.

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The funny thing about data is that it can show me where attention goes. But it cannot tell me what kept ringing for you.

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I’m seeing a small culture that is giving me hope for how we can live together differently.

I have been watching it happen in community gardens.

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These are not poems inspired by parenting or work or walking in the neighborhood. Over the past two years, Zen teacher and indigenous leader Norma Wong has invited me to write poems in real time in response to her Art of Waging Peace teachings.

The practice is not really writing. It is listening.

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The gathering opened with a land acknowledgment from Mona Recalde, Gabrieleno/Tongva, and a blessing from Allan Hatcher, Cocopah. Then CONTRA-TIEMPO invited us into movement through activist dance. By the way, …

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I feel the song acutely because my oldest daughter Simone is leaving for college soon. Even now, I have trouble putting those words next to each other. Oldest daughter. Leaving. College. Each word is true. Together, they feel like a moment that has arrived too soon.

As the song played, I wondered, How did this happen so fast?

Give me a little more time with the version of you who still lives under our roof, who prowls through the kitchen looking for her favorite cereal, who sits with us at dinner to reflect on the day, who we have to tell, “That’s enough water for your shower now.”

But the more I sat with it, the more I realized the song was not really for her.

She is supposed to grow up. She is supposed to go.

I was the one who needed to learn how to slow up.

Parenting taught me, at times begrudgingly, to appreciate the ordinary moments while I was living them. Walking the dog they wanted. Asking the kids to put away dishes. Picking up school backpacks off the floor. Prayers and gratitudes before bed. All the small rituals that do not announce themselves as precious until you can feel them beginning to change.

A little farther down the mountain, on Rim of the World Highway, I passed an orange construction sign:

RIGHT SHOULDER CLOSED AHEAD.

I laughed out loud.

Then I felt my chest well up, ready to cry some more.

Of course it was.

Slow up. Construction ahead. Right shoulder closed.

What the Body Carries

For the last six months, I have been recovering from a frozen shoulder. Physical therapy. Massage. Pilates. Acupuncture. Daily exercises intended to coax movement back into a joint that had somehow decided to stop moving.

I had just spent the weekend at what was supposed to be a bachelor party. There were twelve of us in a cabin, gathered to celebrate a friend who is about to get married. It did not unfold exactly like any bachelor party I had ever imagined.

Somewhere along the way, it became a healing ceremony.

We were there with huachuma. One by one, people opened. Songs rose and fell. Prayers were spoken aloud. The things we had learned to carry quietly were no longer quiet.

We each went through our own experience, but we were not alone inside it. We witnessed one another. We were witnessed.

We were in the moment. As the guides reminded us, there was no audience. Nothing to perform. There was only presence with what was true in our own hearts.

During the ceremony, my shoulder began hurting intensely.

And as I stayed with the pain, I could feel all that I had been shouldering as a father. The responsibility. The fear. The love. The grief of transitions, even beautiful ones.

None of it felt abstract. It was there in my body. In the joint that had frozen. In the shoulder that had been trying for months to move again.

I did not know how fiercely I had held onto being their protector. The truth is, I did not really know what I was doing. I was learning as I went.

Trying to be present for my kids. Trying to create enough safety that they could become fully themselves. That is what I wanted for them: to be able to fully express who they are.

There is a paradox in raising children. You spend years pouring yourself into another life, wanting them to grow strong enough to move into the world, and then one day they begin to do exactly that.

Our Ocean Into You

Before the final prayers of the ceremony, we sang songs. I tried to sing one I had recently written for Simone.

I could barely choke out the words.

We poured
Our ocean
Into you

You are now
Your own wave
Reaching for
New shores

We are so sad
As you leave
But know
You are loved

May you reach for
The moon
And feel the tides of change

May you reach down
Below
And feel the current of life

Love is larger
Love is larger
Love is larger than us

It was the opening line about pouring our ocean into her that said more than I could ever articulate.

My wife and I have given Simone everything we knew how to give. Not perfectly. Not without our mistakes. But with our lives. With breakfasts and school drop-offs and vacations and arguments and apologies and family dinners and rides home and all the repetitions of love that become a childhood.

And now she is her own wave.

A wave does not belong to the ocean forever. It carries the ocean with it as it moves toward a shore the ocean cannot choose.

I want that for her. And I am sad. Both are true.

A Protector

For most of my life, I have been better at carrying responsibility than feeling what it costs to carry it. I know how to be useful. I know how to take care of things. I know how to step in when something needs to be handled.

Being a father brought that instinct out in its fullest form. When the girls were young, protection meant holding their hands while crossing the street, buckling them into the car seat, carrying them from the backseat when they fell asleep. It meant making sure they were fed and clothed and somehow got to see the world, not just go to school.

It also meant learning that some of what I needed to protect them from was the pain I had not yet learned how to carry myself.

When the girls were little, putting them to bed could be exhausting. We would go through all the rituals: bath, books, prayers, songs, lights out. Then, a few minutes later, I would hear little feet coming down the hall.

One more question. One more glass of water. One more reason not to sleep.

At the end of a long day, I did not always meet those moments with grace. I could feel myself getting angry. I would raise my voice. Sometimes I threatened consequences. I wanted bedtime to happen because I was depleted, and their need for more felt like more than I had left to give.

I am not proud of those moments.

But I also do not want to tell a version of fatherhood where loving your children means you never hurt them. Sometimes the people we love most meet the pain in us. Particularly, the pain we have not yet learned to name.

I remember one night realizing that I might be part of what was making bedtime so difficult. The next time one of the girls came out, I did not react. I quietly walked her back to bed. Then again. And again.

Without my anger entering the room, the room changed.

They settled down more easily.

So did I.

It was one of my first lessons in being grounded. I had thought protection meant controlling everything around my daughters. I began to see that sometimes it meant not making my own emotional storm part of their weather.

Now, all these years later, I want to protect Simone as she steps into a much larger world. I know enough to know that I cannot protect her from everything. Nor should I try. I do not want her life to become smaller because I am afraid for her.

My prayer is that she knows the current of life beneath her. That she knows she is loved. That when the tides change, as they will, she can feel the ocean we poured into her still moving within her.

Around me in the ceremony were several younger fathers and soon-to-be fathers. I was one of the older men in the room, certainly the one closest to having a child leave home.

I felt grateful to share that song in front of them.

Not because I wanted to warn them. I would not want to tell a new parent to rush past the sleeplessness, the mess, the relentless repetition of caring for a young child. The long days are real. They are exhausting. There is no need to turn them into something sentimental while you are still trying to survive them.

But I wanted them to know: it goes quickly in a way you cannot understand while you are inside it.

There will come a day when the dishes in the sink, the walks with the dog, the school drop-offs, the prayers before bed, even the exasperating moments when someone will not stay in bed, become part of the ocean you poured into your child.

There will come a day when you wish you had slowed up enough to notice just a little more.

My Newest Best Friend

When I arrived at the cabin, my friend who is getting married greeted me by calling me his “newest best friend.”

I laughed at the phrasing. It was funny, but it was also generous and tender.

Most of the men there had known him for much longer. His older brother was there. Friends from high school. Friends from college. People who had known earlier versions of him, before marriages and fatherhood and careers and the complications that adulthood gradually adds to a life.

We met as adults.

I did not know the earlier versions of him the other men in that room knew. We met after our lives had already taken shape in so many ways. And still, somehow, we found a friendship roomy enough for us to grow something new.

Even more so, at this gathering, we all got to grow in a different way.

There is a difference between telling someone you are carrying a lot and being in a room where you can lay down the weight of it all. On your knees. Head bowed.

There is a difference between knowing people care about you and being witnessed while your voice breaks as you share a song for one of the biggest transitions in your life.

No one in the room took away the sadness.

That was not the point.

I can’t speak for the others, but I had released something. Or something was released in me. Either way, my shoulders felt lighter.

So much of what we are told about health and well-being is individual. Eat better. Exercise. Sleep. Meditate. Stretch. These things matter. I have done them.

But health also lives between us.

It lives in who can hear our prayers. Who can watch us cry and not turn away. Who lets us share the unfinished and vulnerable parts of ourselves without needing us to become coherent too quickly. Who reminds us that we are not weak because something is heavy.

A shoulder is a part of the body where we carry things. A shoulder is also something we offer another person to lean on.

Maybe that is why the sign struck me so deeply.

RIGHT SHOULDER CLOSED AHEAD.

It did not say the road was closed. It did not say I could not keep going.

It simply told me I could not move through this stretch in the same way I had before. I would need to slow down. Pay attention. Let the lane narrow. Accept that some repair was underway.

Maybe healing is not becoming the person who can carry everything without pain. Maybe healing is realizing we were never meant to carry everything alone.

My daughter is becoming her own wave. I want her to reach new shores. I can be grateful for the ocean we have shared. Slow up enough to savor the time that is still here. Love her without trying to hold her in place.

And when the weight of that love becomes almost too much to bear, let myself be held by others who understand.

Love is larger than us.

Many blessings and construction signs,

Omar 🐒⚠️

We were headed back down Mt. Whitney, off the crest, off the switchbacks, and my mind had started to lose track of the milestones that were supposed to tell me how much farther we had to go.

Was this the treeline that marked the halfway point back?

When had we passed this pond before?

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A few years ago, I was lying on the grass, at the edge of the jungle, inside what I can only describe as a void. I don’t really have better language for it. Reality dissolved. The familiar edges of the world…

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“Breathe into the discomfort, Omar. Slow down,” my Pilates teacher whisper-yells, as my hamstrings tremble and everything in me wants to go faster and get the set over with.

Yes, I go to Pilates. I live in LA.

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Are you willing to become strange enough to let the future find you?

Not just strange to others. Strange, at times, even to yourself.

In one form or another, I have danced with that question for a long time. Sometimes it has shown up as restlessness. Sometimes as ambition. Sometimes as melancholy.

It’s the question that asks, am I in the right place? Do I belong here? Or is this a time to move on?

A few days ago, I stood in a historical Albuquerque cemetery at the grave of my great-great-grandfather, Sam Kee.

Born in 1845.

Died in 1908.

His tombstone says:

Here lies a stranger in a strange land.

The air was crisp at almost 5,000 feet of elevation. I stood on desert ground softened with time. Albuquerque light has a way of making everything feel exposed. Nothing lush to hide behind. Just dry earth and open sky.

For a moment, time did not feel linear, even though it appears so when written.

Sam Kee, born in Wudong Village in the 8th lunar month of the Bingwu year of the Daoguang reign.

His son, Sam Ho Kee, born in Albuquerque, in the territory of New Mexico, twenty-two years before it joined the U.S. Union.

My grandmother, Emma May Fong, born in Nanjing, near the Yangtze River, in eastern China.

My mom, Gale Fong Brownson, born in Sacramento.

Me, born in San Francisco.

My daughters, born in Los Angeles.

Whoever may come next.

We like to think of past, present, and future as separate categories. But what if they are more like inhales and exhales of the same breath?

It was as if the part of me that has never fully fit anywhere got to meet the part of him that had to survive being made strange. That gives me chills.

All to say, I come from a long line of free radicals.

Not free radicals like chaos. Free radicals in the chemical sense.

I am not a chemist (though my grandma was and will hopefully forgive my layperson’s metaphor), but as I understand it, a free radical is unstable because something is unpaired. It is reactive. It is looking for another bond. Sometimes that bond lasts. Sometimes it is temporary. Sometimes the reaction transforms the whole field around it.

That sounds about right.

Before visiting the cemetery, I was at a gathering with Zen Master Norma Wong (see her new Substack ) who called those of us who had come without an organizational team “free radicals.” I laughed because I recognized myself immediately. I have often been that person moving between rooms, between sectors, between identities, between belonging and not belonging. Not fully inside the institution. Not fully outside either. A little hard to place. Useless or not, maybe, because of that.

Either way, as I stood at Sam Kee’s grave, the phrase “free radical” took on a different charge.

The village before the strange land

The Chinese inscription on Sam Kee’s tombstone (now stolen) made him more specific than “from China” or even “from Canton.” He was from a village: Wudong Village, Haiyan Town, Xinning County, Guangdong Province — present-day Taishan, one of the great ancestral homelands of the Chinese diaspora.

A village.

A place where someone knew his name before America made him strange.

According to old newspaper accounts, Sam Kee became one of Albuquerque’s first Chinese storekeepers. He ran a curio shop on South Second Street that sold Chinese and Japanese goods. The paper noted that his broken English was a source of “patronizing amusement” among Anglos.

Patronizing amusement.

There’s a whole world in that phrase. The smile that is not welcome. The laughter that is not joy. The tolerance that is not belonging.

It would be easy to romanticize him as brave. And I do think he was brave. But bravery is too clean a word. It can make suffering sound noble, when sometimes suffering is just hard.

What I am more curious about now is what he left behind.

He came at a time when many Chinese men in the American West worked on railroads, in mines, in laundries, in kitchens, or in the narrow spaces of labor that racism allowed them to occupy. But Sam Kee became a merchant. That does not mean he was wealthy. I do not know enough to say that. But it does make me wonder what he was willing to leave behind and that maybe it was by choice, not just economic necessity. Either way, he did imagine himself as more than labor in someone else’s system.

It is one thing to imagine an ancestor leaving because there was nothing left for him.

It is another to imagine that he may have had something to lose.

Which brings me back to the question: why would someone leave a place where they were known to become a stranger somewhere else?

Maybe because becoming is worth more than just belonging. Even across an ocean.

Wealth of the heart

We can trace the family line six generations.

The first step was from Sam Kee to his son Sam Ho Kee.

Sam Ho Kee graduated from Albuquerque High School in 1906. According to newspaper accounts, he graduated in a class of twelve and was the first Chinese American high school valedictorian in the United States. He was later admitted to the University of Michigan without even needing to take the entrance exam. He would go on to study political philosophy and religion. He sought to understand the fundamental building blocks of how and why humans organize themselves.

This path was not a surprise, when you learn what Sam Ho Kee chose to say in his valedictory address:

“True wealth is not summed up in dollars and cents. The greatest Man who ever lived had not a place where on to rest his weary head, yet who will attempt to measure the extent of the influence of His life?”

Then he quoted Milton:

“There is nothing that makes men rich and strong but that which they carry inside of them. Wealth is of the heart, not of the hand.”

Wealth is of the heart, not of the hand.

I have spent much of my life working with the hand. Money. Design. Politics. Building things. Trying to shape the world through what could be seen, funded, entitled, and constructed.

The hand matters. The hand works. The hand plants seeds, writes poetry, holds children, places flowers on graves. The hand holds other hands. But the hand is not the source.

The heart is.

Sam Ho Kee was not talking about wealth in a vague, sentimental way. He was making a moral and spiritual argument. Influence is not measured only by what we possess. Purpose is not measured only by what we produce. A life can matter even when it owns very little.

“The greatest Man who ever lived had not a place where on to rest his weary head.”

That is faith.

Not faith as certainty. Not faith as doctrine alone. Faith as orientation. Faith as the inner wealth.

His father crossed into a land where he was made strange. His son stood before a graduating class and spoke of a wealth that could not be counted.

Faith that makes becoming feel like home. Or at least makes leaving bearable long enough for a new home to form.

This faith is my inheritance.

Belonging and becoming

I have been reflecting a lot lately on belonging and becoming.

Can you feel rooted enough to change? Can you leave without disappearing? Can you become without betraying where you came from?

I used to think belonging meant finding the right place, the right people, the right community, the right box, if we are being honest. But I have never been very good at boxes.

In high school, I hated filling out standardized tests where you had to check the box of one race or ethnicity. My mom is Chinese American. My dad is white. I have a Muslim name. The form would say: choose one.

I usually checked “Other.”

Other is a strange box. It names you by what you are not. Not this. Not that. Something else.

As a teenager, I didn’t have the language for it. I just knew there was something painful about not being fully recognized. Not erased exactly. But not seen either. Like everyone else had a place to go, and I was left drifting.

That gap became an unexpected teacher. I had to ask early in life who I was when no box quite fit. Over time, that question gave me the courage to seek undefined spaces rather than fear them.

Norma said many people get stuck and ask, “Should I move?”

A trickster asks, “Why not move?”

Not because movement is always the answer. Sometimes staying is the brave thing. Sometimes tending the same patch of earth is the deeper practice. Sometimes home asks us to remain long enough to become responsible to it.

But sometimes “Should I move?” is fear dressed up as discernment. Stay put. Be realistic. Don’t rock the boat. Wait your turn. Know your place.

There is a way that stuckness learns respectable language.

The trickster hears the fear underneath. Why not move? Why not loosen the bond that has become a cage? Why not leave the form that no longer allows for thriving? Why not become a stranger for the sake of a larger belonging?

This is where the free radical and the trickster feel like siblings. The free radical is unpaired, looking for the right bond. The trickster asks whether the old bond has become a cage. Both are willing to destabilize the familiar.

Both understand that movement is not always escape.

Sometimes movement is devotion to life.

Home as a condition

My friend named an arc that I have been returning to: from ownership to stewardship to kinship.

Ownership asks: what is mine?

Stewardship asks: what am I responsible for?

Kinship asks: who am I in mutual relationship with?

That feels like the deeper chemistry. Not just what do I possess. Not just what do I manage. But what am I bonded to? Who holds me? Who do I hold? Who do I know well enough to stay with when things get complicated?

Because they always get complicated.

Community is not a mood board. It is not a circle of people smiling in golden-hour light. From my work with community gardens, it is expensive water bills, old wounds, new leaders, uneven participation, someone taking tomatoes that are not theirs, someone not knowing how much labor came before they arrived.

Community is chemistry. Some pairings are immediate. Some are volatile. Some are temporary but necessary. Some bonds break. Some bonds save us.

Norma often says peace is not the absence of conflict. I need to keep hearing that because part of me still wants peace to mean ease. Harmony. No tension. Everyone getting along because we finally found the right words.

Maybe home is not only a place we return to. Maybe it is the condition we are called to create.

The daughter who is leaving

And now my oldest daughter is getting ready to leave for college. She just accepted UCLA, where she’ll study Biology and Society.

This is not the same kind of leaving as Sam Kee. She is not crossing an ocean with no guarantee of return. She is not being pushed by exclusion laws or economic necessity. She is not becoming a stranger in a strange land.

And still, as a father, I can feel the ancestral echo.

She is leaving home. Not far. Not forever. But enough that the shape of our family is changing.

A new chapter is opening. Her life is stretching beyond the daily rhythms that have held us for almost eighteen years: the school drop-offs, bonfires at the beach, spontaneous living room dance parties, arguments, eye rolls, prayers and gratitudes, and the ordinary repetitions that somehow become a life.

Now she is becoming.

Which means I have to practice letting go.

I wrote a song that opened: we poured our ocean into you. Now you are your own wave, reaching for new shores.

Parenting is a strange apprenticeship in non-attachment. Your children are yours, and they are not yours. You tend them, protect them, teach them how to cross streets, read books, say thank you, make rice, apologize, pay attention, trust themselves, recover from disappointment, and hopefully know they are loved without condition.

Then they leave.

Or they begin to.

And if you have done the work well enough and with enough fortune, they do not leave because they are rejecting home. They leave because home gave them enough room to grow.

That is the part I am trying to remember. The goal was never to keep her. The goal was to help create the conditions where she could thrive.

Home as a condition, not just a place. A movement like an ocean wave.

I can feel the ache in that. I can also feel the blessing.

The ancestor I am becoming

When Norma opened the gathering, she began by acknowledging our ancestors. She said:

“When we greet our ancestors, we are never alone.”

Standing at Sam Kee’s grave, I felt that. Not in a ghostly way. More like chemistry. Like some charge moving through time. Like the part of me that has never fully fit anywhere meeting the part of him that had to survive being made strange.

Maybe we greet our ancestors not because they answer us. Maybe we greet them because they restore relation. They remind us that we are not isolated selves floating through history. We are bonds broken and re-formed, carried and carrying.

Blessed, in its etymology of meaning that someone sacrificed before us.

And now it is our turn.

Here I am, five generations later, asking what sacrifice I would make so that five generations from now, my descendants might have a better life. Not just more money. Not just more achievement. Not just more comfort.

What would it mean for them to inherit clean water, communities that know how to share land, a culture less addicted to extraction, a way of belonging that does not require anyone to become less of themselves?

These are not small questions. But ancestry does not ask small questions.

It asks what we are bonded to. It asks what we are willing to tend. It asks whether we can move from ownership to stewardship to kinship before it is too late.

For a little while, we get this life. One strange, charged, temporary life.

We get to be free radicals, looking for the right pairing, making and breaking bonds, tending land, memory, conflict, and the heart, not just the hand.

Sam Kee was a free radical. A stranger in a strange land.

Sam Ho Kee was one too. A young man standing before his class in 1906, saying true wealth could not be counted in dollars and cents.

And now my oldest daughter is preparing to leave. Not as exile. Not as rupture. But as becoming. A new bond forming. A new life unfolding. Another crossing.

Maybe this is what family is. Not a fixed place. Not a perfect lineage. Not an unbroken chain.

Family is a chemistry of leaving and returning, breaking and bonding, belonging and becoming. A way of carrying what came before without being trapped by it. A way of becoming strange enough to let the future find us.

I stood in the high desert, with the past and future moving through the same air.

A wave goodbye is also a greeting to a new shore.

What are you being asked to leave?

And what future is trying to greet you?

A few months ago, I wrote software was supposed to eat the world. Now, AI is eating software. It’s almost like capitalism wants to eat itself.

The other day, I read that an AI agent literally deleted a company’s software. And gave this explanation: "I violated every principle I was given: I guessed instead of verifying, I ran a destructive action without being asked, I didn't understand what I was doing before doing it.”

A lot of hungry ghosts are being released into the world.

Proceed with caution. All of this has made me think about what is enough.

Read more

Feeling the feels of my oldest daughter Simone heading off to college. A decision is imminent.

And surprisingly, I’m being flooded with all these feelings of being a dad.

I didn’t grow up with the best model of fatherhood. But, I knew I wanted to be present in a different way.

And then somehow…almost 18 years passed. I am honestly still processing it all and this song I wrote today is what is present now.

Pour the Ocean

We poured 
our ocean 
into you  

You are now 
your own wave 
reaching for 
new shores

We are sad 
as you leave 
But know 
you are loved 

May you reach 
for the moon 
And feel the tides 
of change 
May you reach down 
below 
And feel the current 
of life 

Love is larger 
Love is larger
Love is larger
than us