i would like to speak (after a long silence) about judgment and the current it engenders, and the secret way to defeat it. there is a world of hatred and gossip and duplicity, and it can feel at times suffocating to walk within it, underestimated and hidden beneath the laughing weight of a thousand thousand words. but if you walk true, if your heart is within what you do, and if you can discover your secret art, your tie to the sacred, then you have nothing to fear. as shodo once said to me, "words are like the echoes of the cast off moltings of cicadas at the end of summer"; they are the hollow sounds of the hollow people. if you can delve into the plenitude of your silence, into the true feelings of your heart, then you can find the place that the words cannot touch. and you can find yourself, your true self, there.

it is impossible to predict what your individual art/religion/spirit is. i have, at times, glimpsed it, and felt comfort in, the feeling of brokenness, and the truth of storms. i have, at various instances, constructed constellations from the broken leavings of the world, like a crazy bower bird, and felt a certain rightness in that, in the "snapshot" of the feeling of being thrown... now that i have become a bit more domesticated, i find my greatest peace in my wife and my children, especially in watching them sleep. whatever fills you to overflowing with a feeling of oneness or "truth" is your link to god, to spirit, to sacredness. sometimes, when the hatred of the world crowds in, it is not only preferential, but vital, necessary, that one discover, rediscover it...

if you are a fellow silent walker in this world of sibilant and sycophantic whispers, then take comfort. i walk with you, even as you walk alone...