Long before there was any felt need for a path — let alone finding one — there was an orientation that seems, in retrospect, to have been pointing here all along.
As a child, a phrase came naturally: it is what it is. Not resignation. Not indifference. Something closer to a quiet recognition that reality had a way of being exactly what it was, regardless of — well — whatever. It became something of a family saying, repeated back with affection by a father who had no idea his son was unknowingly pointing at something over two thousand years old.
The path, when it finally appeared, felt less like a discovery than a coming home.
It began simply. A book picked up on vacation in middle age — You Are Here by Thich Nhat Hanh. What started as a five-minute daily mindfulness practice quickly became morning and evening sessions, interrupted by dharma podcasts, YouTube talks, and audiobooks. The hunger was immediate and surprising — not for belief or belonging, but something closer to finding a lost favorite sweater or relearning a skill that had somehow always been known.
The early years were Theravada — structured, rigorous, precise. Vipassana. A Thai Forest sangha led by a kind monk who scarcely spoke English. The careful observation of arising and passing. Then an interest in Jhana, working with a teacher, feeling something open. Life became more spacious. Equanimity arrived — not as an achievement but as a settling, like sediment dropping out of water that had always been clear underneath.
And then dreams began pointing elsewhere.
Not metaphorically. Literally — a name arose that meant nothing, and it turned out it meant everything. Direct knowings, arising from nowhere. Distinct from thought. Distinct from imagination. Following those pointers led, through many beautiful teachers, to a qualified master who pointed at the nature of mind directly. Something was recognized in that meeting — a jolting, chainsaw quality, cutting through the discursive mind — that no amount of reading or practice had produced.
And it faded as soon as the retreat ended.
What followed was years of practice under genuine guidance. Retreats. Transmission. The slow, unglamorous, occasionally truly astonishing — dare I say magical — work of Vajrayana. Ngondro. Dream practices. The natural state, glimpsed and lost and glimpsed again — not achieved but revealed, the way a landscape emerges as fog lifts.
Early on, pieces seemed to fall away bit by bit. The operative word was equanimity — a settling, a steadiness, an okayness that kept the fighting with oneself quiet. The view found its stability in dream. And it was nothing like what had been imagined.
No fireworks. No permanent altered state. The back still ached. The dog still barked. But the center was gone. Equanimity, it turned out, was just the first taste. What followed was something lighter still — ease. The difference between standing firm in a storm and discovering there was never a storm to stand firm against.
And then something harder to name fell away. The filter came off. The constant low-grade negotiation with reality — this should be different, I should feel otherwise, when this changes then I'll be okay — went quiet. What remained was just this. Ordinary.
Completely, utterly ordinary. And yet — not available for any price. Not figuratively. Literally.
This is the paradox that can't be resolved from the outside: how can something be ordinary and at the same time be the thing you would not trade for everything that exists? The answer, if there is one, is that the extraordinariness was always the nature of the ordinary — it was this filter, like a pair of dirty sunglasses, that made it seem otherwise. Remove the filter and what's left isn't less. It's just unobstructed.
It is what it is — it turns out — was always pointing here. Not at resignation. At the ground itself. Seen in its nakedness. Not arrived at by adding anything or acquiring anything you don't already have. Only by letting go.
Since then, a dark retreat and a pith instruction: just ride the fucking horse. It's understood the way one sees the ocean in a drop, the mountain in a mustard seed. Practice is now an offering — effervescent gratitude, birdseed and butter lamps.