i’m giving up
on language
my next book will be blank
pages of various textures and hues
i have touched in
certain spots and patterns
and depending upon the mood the reader can come
with me or take me somewhere else

As good teachers weave the fabric that joins them with students and subjects, the heart is the loom on which the threads are tied, the tension is held, the shuttle flies, and the fabric is stretched tight. Small wonder, then, that teaching tugs at the heart, opens the heart, even breaks the heart—and the more one loves teaching, the more heartbreaking it can be. The courage to teach is the courage to keep one’s heart open in those very moments when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able so that teacher and students and subject can be woven into the fabric of community that learning, and living, require.

Our lives are patterns of the fabric produced by the loom of time and space.
When we see the individual things, each one is impermanent, constantly changing, without any fixed independent entity.
But this work of weaving continues. Our life is a result and a gift from people and things from the past.
What we do now influences later generations, whether positively or negatively.
The loom is weaving the ancient brocade of eternity, while the spring is new, fresh and different each year.
The spring of the entire heaven and earth is manifested within a tiny plum blossom in the cold air.
The tiny blossom actualizes the spring of the entire heaven and earth.
All individual things are working together as a whole without anything being excluded.
There is no observer and observation from outside.
--- Shohaku Okumura Roshi

"She now came and stood beside me and placed one arm around my shoulders, and with the other she held on to my two hands; she drew me close to her. She must have known that I was about to break apart, and what she was doing was holding me together in one piece, like the series of tin bands that hold a box of goods together if it is being sent far overseas. I stood still in silence. My head ached, my eyes ached, my mouth was dry but I could not swallow, my throat ached, inside my ears was the sound of waves wanting to break free but only dashing themselves against a wall of rocks. I could not cry. I could not speak. I was trying to get the muscles in my face to do what I wanted them to do, trying to gain control over myself."

At this intense place of physical, psychic, and soulful communication, we transcend the limits of our finiteness, the boundaries of controlled observation, we pass through walls of skin and self to another union difficult to explicate because we are using words for an emotional event that transcends the literal, the linear, this format of speaking and writing. The impulse to form surges gently from the entirety. Not like a flash and over. A continual gentle surge to be let out, to give form.

"If I was a technologist and the oldest person of the next generation is only five years old, how do I communicate everything I know about technology that needs to carry on for the next generation? I have to tell her these stories in ways she might remember. Maybe I put it in the designs of the clothing she wears; I weave it into the baskets that she’s born in. I’m going to essentially decentralize this to the point where a piece of this thread is in everything she touches. We have to make sure that it’s accessible to all these different types of people that will be able to carry that forward."