09/22/2025
I spent the past two days sharpening old chisels and planes and things. I love them very much. The plane (an unusually small one) is so cute and the chisels are two beefy wood-hoggers for sure. Ella would give them names like Ollie and Santander. or something. Ella is much better at being Ella than my imagination of Ella is. I like taking care of tools. It is more fun than trying to make something with tools that need some care.Now we are watching football on the couch. My dad is usually very upset when he is watching sports because the Tennessee professional sports teams are never very good. But tonight he is watching the Michigan football team because he grew up in Michigan and it is very strange because instead of saying funny things like "this guy is a total boob" or "where'd you learn how to tackle? shitty tackling school?" he is just cackling and saying things that imply the players are his friends(/children?).
I am leaving soon. First I will see Chris in Chicago and then a play my friend wrote(? or directed or something) outside Minneapolis and then I will go to far north Minnesota to spend five days hewing and sawing logs and then five days making those pieces into a frame of a building.
Today I gave a talk to the Berkeley Zen Center community on line. I said I am trying to spend my life making beautiful places and right now I am trying to learn a beautiful way of doing carpentry. I also said that it is really hard to do all this stuff without help or community or a teacher. Everyone was really encouraging and supportive it made me tear up. Mira said she wished I was her son. She is so funny. Her daughter is really pretty and she was trying to introduce us last time I was in Berkeley. I usually go to her house because her printer acts funny and I have to fix it. She has a beautiful garden and an old cat with a scratchy voice.
Now it's bed time.
05/28/2025
After dinner I spent two hours scything and the sun was still up. Things are well.05/15/2025
Last night I dreamt in a loop– meeting a girl, leaving her for another who I loved better, moving into a new apartment where I promptly had to lock the door against the cops and sprint up many flights of stairs. And then I would meet a new girl and do it all again.
It is so confusing to (seem to) see clearly what others simply do not. Like we all know what beauty is, we know what love is, why are you lying about it?!
I have decided that I would rather seek out warm community where I can learn to build than seek out master builders with whom I could individually apprentice. I am sick of being a fighting-for-myself individual; ready to care for and be cared for again. One day I will build beautiful homes, maybe a village or a school.
Today is my last in Ljubljana.
04/23/2025
Today I was sobbing on the plane from Frankfurt to Ljubljana listening to Paul Simon. Feeling so clear and devoted to the loveliness of the world. I *am* building a place where people live in deep relationship with place and each other and God.
So glad to have a friend like Ella in my life. There is something about England that makes me feel like a wild little kid...
These are the days of miracle and wonder... These are the days of lasers in the jungle...
I am traveling with ghosts and empty sockets; I'm looking at ghosts and empties. And I've reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland.
He looks around, around, and sees angels in the architecture; spinning in infinity, he says, "Hey, Hallelujah!"
I've got diamonds on the soles of my shoes!
This is the story of how we begin to remember. This is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein.
03/20/2025
Today I am like Kiki when she's having a fun date with Tombo. Enjoying pottery with the old ladies and working on my project language in the sunshine in the old city.
03/09/2025
On Monday I spent an hour interviewing my overdue pregnant friend, imagining the ideal cottage and farmhouse for raising her new family.
On Tuesday I sat in the most beautiful reading room in a library any of us have ever seen. Except maybe Ella. You had to reserve a seat in advance.
On Wednesday everything I did was a complete disaster.
On Thursday I had to explain to a middle-aged man why "When was the last time you kissed someone?" is a "fucking creepy" thing to say to a college-aged goth girl.
On Friday I got frustrated and confused and changed my planned project.
On Saturday I fell off the top floor of a barn.
(uninjured)
And later I watched forty women and one blind man play accordions together. Mostly nice songs and some really jarring silly ones.
On Sunday I convinced my host to offer me much more support to make this project happen. And now find myself unsure if that's actually the right project to do.
02/28/2025
lines in recent dreams that made me laugh myself awake:
"Pewter is the croissant of metals." [spoken with confidence before someone chowed down on a cheese knife]
"Mother may I please have a cup to catch my pee?" [addressed towards a group of girls that were flirting with me, NOT my mother]
2/19/2025
Today I saw beautiful buildings. And I bought a fancy frying pan. Just like Kiki when she first came to town.
2/18/2025
Today I sat on a bench and cried because I couldn't remember the slovenska word for blanket.
I've been feeling a lot like Kiki when she first comes to town.
2/15/2025
A gaggle of flight attendants babbling in french whoosh past my left knee. A few minutes later a steady trickle of young women wearing the exact same green UMiami hoodie (go canes indeed) and matching black and orange leggings dribbles past my right knee. I am covered in the crumbs of sesame cashews that I spilled all over the inside of my backpack.
2/7/2025
I just mmm fking love mixing oil paints and making like 3 muddy browns in a row and then discovering the exact dark red I was looking for. And then a dark green. OOoo making colors is just so cool f!
2/4/2025
thoroughly enjoying the Plan of St. Gall, a drawing for an imagined Benedictine monastery from the 9th century. It's like a complete, simple, gentle vision for all one could need from a place.
see!
1/28/2025
I am back on worm. Mostly because I keep interacting with cool people and want to have some documentation of my life so they can see what it is I am doing. It is not a career at all.
But god it feels so lame to like be documenting things for this reason. I want to be like
un hinged.
Ella and Juhi's logs are so right and true.
My life is full of doing what seems right. Working really hard on designing a house and a garden on this abandoned lot– "what is right what is right what is whole" "how could this become totally full of life"
too much muchness, too much "right", I think I'm too worried about the teachers' critiques. resolving to not be.
not having social scene makes for a lot of internal-ness, a lot of sensitivity to path and fate and whatnot.. the doubt is working at subtler levels now. the dreams are true but. just making things for its own sake– not quite it. too much fear of mistakes hahaha
the wheels are set in motion though
its fascinating
I like moving stones with my hands, they are so rough and old and heavy
and my clothes look cute every single day
9/1/2024
Today the Timeless Way of Building reading group (tm) met for the fourth time. It is so invigorating to digest such true words in the company of true friends. We read the second chapter "the quality without a name". In it, Alexander describes the central quality that makes a building, town, person, etc come to life and, in doing so, shows why there is no word that quite fits it.Delicious! All of the words we have are just a bit too broad or too narrow or have connotations that could lead us astray. So we can't get lazy. We can't say "oh yeah that quality is just aliveness" or "oh yeah that's just eternalness" or wholeness or freedom or any of the other words that come close. We have to let the quality live outside of language, un-pinnable by our words that could so easily reduce or abstract it. The quality remains nameless, retaining its essence and its dignity. Delicious!
It's so juicy to read this with zen students. We're already on the same page (at least intellectually) that there is no difference or boundary between our (apparently) internal and external experiences. So we get straight to the meat of things without having to convince anyone of that. The Timeless Way is almost a Dharma text, pointing us to what-is-really-going-on-here. But because Alexander is working from how to make good buildings, it hits at such a different angle than most Dharma. Circling round the quality-without-a-name, invoking its true spirit without nailing it down in words, reminds me over and over what I'm actually doing here. And how rich to have company that is just as struck by it as me!
It is not only simple beauty of form and color. Men can make that without making nature. It is not only fitness to purpose. Man can make that too without making nature. And it is not only the spiritual quality of beautiful music or of a quiet mosque that comes from faith. Man can make that too, without making nature.
The quality which has no name includes these simpler sweeter qualities. But it is so ordinary as well that it somehow reminds us of the passing of our own life.
It is a slightly bitter quality.