What to Expect When You're Not Expecting
A Pilgrimage to Nowhere
I was catching up with an old friend who told me his 6 year old daughter has been taught to accept whatever emotions arise. My own emotional literacy, I realized, has finally caught up to kindergarten.
What does radical acceptance feel like? Each emotion rings the bell and I answer: welcome. The Nyingma oath attributed to Dorje Tröllö whispers, “Whatever happens; may it happen. Whichever way it goes; may it go that way.” Practice dissolves into life itself; as psychologist‑teacher Tucker Peck notes in a recent podcast (spotify, apple), giving unconditional permission to every mind‑state is its own pacification.
Yet acceptance doesn’t flatten experiences; it sharpens it. During the upheavals of the past year even the “appropriate” emotions sliced me open, leaving me wide open and vulnerable. Peck would call that sanity: feeling exactly what the moment calls for, no more‑no less. And that present moment becomes luminous and sacred without the past or the future superimposed upon it.
Against that backdrop I wandered through Asia’s Buddhist heartlands with no agenda beyond openness. I meditated at the moss garden temple in Kyoto1. I hiked the Kumano Kodo.2 An old woman helped me pray and make an offering at a shrine at the top of a ruined Buddhist temple in Angkor3. I explored the many temples of at Bai Dinh, the largest Buddhist temple complex in Vietnam4. It features a “corridor of the arhats” which contain 500 unique arhat statues each with its own unique motif and mudra.5 I marveled at the size of the reclining Buddha6 at Wat Pho in Bangkok. There’s so much more - dozens of cave shrines7, stone carvings8, and the even the occasional Theravada dharma lesson.9
Everywhere I went I prayed—sometimes words, sometimes silence—letting love radiate toward my ex, my family, all those suffering around the world. My direct experience of the sacred is not accompanied by metaphysical certainty, so I pray for my prayers instead.
Pilgrimage offered, paradoxically, nothing. A layer of ego around “getting” something from spiritual work seems to have loosened. Bodhicitta, the cultivation of skillful means, and devotion remain, but the itch to collect retreats, exotic states of mind, or stacks of dharma books is absent. Shifts continue to bloom, but predicting my mind’s next season seems beside the point—there is only this open awareness moving through a beautiful and precious life.
No longer a seeker, just trying to be a helper10.
It was snowing that day! The monk was unperturbed by the cold.
In preparation I read this very weird and interesting book about the trail, Kumano Kodo: Pilgrimage to Powerspots. Partly a history, partly a travelogue, the book interperses philosophical musings on the nature of pilgrimage, the modern and pre-modern history of the Kumano Kodo, the story of the authors’ own journey, told out of order. No topic is spared: for each segment of the hike, they even list the number of “shit blasts” they experienced.
Two photos of the hike:
It was at the top of this temple:
Just one of the stunning altars in the complex:
Probably my favorite use of AI on the trip was photographing different arhats and having ChatGPT tell me about them.
It’s massive! Look at the bottoms of the feet!
Here are a few:
This was carved relatively recently, but it was still stunning:
The mobility problems have yet to materialize:
I can’t wait to tell you all what I’ve been working on! It’s something intended to make the world better. But I’m not quite ready yet. One thing working at tech companies has taught me is the importance of good marketing moments. You can launch multiple times, of course, but there are a few necessary ingredients to a really good launch. I’m hard at work trying to move those pieces into place. That’s also why I haven’t been posting as much. More to say soon!