Dear friends,
A short piece on chaplaincy that I wrote in 2023, “To the Other Shore,” was republished last week with a March 5, 2026 date stamp, a source of confusion for some. The last couple weeks have been like this: the past occupying the present, a palimpsest of trickster time.
I’m reminded of the clock I spotted in the childhood bedroom of my college roommate Amy while visiting her in Oregon a few years after graduation. The clock face had hands for the hour and minute but no numbers, only a heap of letters where 4 o’clock should’ve been. Unscrambling the heap yielded: WHATEVER. The coup de grâce? Amy hadn’t changed the long-dead batteries in years.
I am the type of person who compulsively changes every timepiece in sight for daylight savings. Last Sunday, while visiting Amy’s mom in Eugene, I managed to leave her microwave alone, though my rental car was not spared. When Amy told me, all those years ago, that she had no intention of changing the VRETAEWH clock batteries, I fought the urge to snoop through every drawer in the house until I got my hands on some AAs.
🕰️
Where lichens thrive, we can breathe easy. Sans root systems, these symbiotic colonies—moss-like but not moss, plant-like but not plants—absorb nutrients from the air. My partner and I have been coming to Point Reyes National Seashore for nearly two decades. In the hilly, forested neighborhood above Tomales Bay where we stayed this time, we couldn’t stop marveling at the dreamscape of lichen, Dali clocks drooping over tree branch ledges.
Even the road signs have sprouted these gray-green marvels. Slow-growing, their annual expansion is measured in millimeters.
🐌
Not far from the lichen-covered “Slow Narrow Road” sign, another person was out for a sunset walk. A face from long ago, oddly familiar. I tried not to stare as we passed each other, exchanging polite nods. By the time my mental rolodex offered a possible answer, the man had disappeared. I ran back up the hill in the direction he’d gone. “Tim?” I called out, though I knew that if his earbuds didn’t drown out my query, the soughing wind certainly would.
Only the lichen waved in reply.
☮️
Dear friends, patient readers, I confess I don’t know where I am going with these words. Fragments from the books I’ve been reading cling to my mind like lichen on a slow narrow road sign.
From poet and peacebuilder John Paul Lederach’s the centuries wrap round us—a gift from a friend in Upaya’s Buddhist chaplaincy program, the very book I was carrying when I encountered possible-Tim:
Wars bear a long legacy which no child asks to be born to and no grandparent wishes to bequeath (114)
From Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity, which I wrestled with in the company of a monthlong online book club co-organized by my Upaya friend and my dear friend Luisely, whose gentle nephew inspired last month’s newsletter:
humans, like other beings, do not own their time or their life (191)
From Natalia Ginzburg’s Happiness, As Such, translated from the Italian by Minna Zallman Proctor:
all of us are vulnerable to the gentle art of ending up in terrible situations that are unresolvable and impossible to move out of (123)
From Kamo-no-Chomei’s Hojoki, which I’ve written about elsewhere:
So as we seeour life is hardin this world.We and our houses fleeting, hollow. (54)...Why not find your friends in song and nature? (72)...If your mind is not at peacewhat use are riches?The grandest hall will never satisfy. (75)
From Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering, which I picked up from Point Reyes Books after it met the three-nudge rule*:
using power to achieve outcomes that are generous, that are for others (82)
From Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, which came highly recommended via Charles Hallissey’s “Seeing Things with Words” talk:
The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction—to locate what is true (31)
And circling back to the centuries wrap round us:
the unknown never announces where it plans to go (83)
🐢
Over the slow accumulation of years, we’ve seen all manner of wildlife in Point Reyes: coyotes, hawks, deer, elephant seals, harbor seals, thule elk, great-horned owls, river otters, bobcats, full-body-breaching whales, sting rays, leopard sharks, a badger, a weasel that really did go pop, in and out of a hole in the trail.
Unlike Tim and Sherry, who have lived here over a quarter of a century, we have not encountered mountain lions.
Eighteen years after my transformative time in the South Africa study abroad program they created and stewarded, I dug up Tim and Sherry’s email addresses. Had I really passed Tim just now? I had!
Walking shoulder to shoulder up the hill on a sunset walk in our temporarily shared neighborhood, I told Tim and Sherry about the unexpected ways those months in Cape Town set me on a path toward Buddhism, chaplaincy, and writing. I told them about my college roommate Amy, her death in 2016 from the rare genetic disease Fanconi anemia, the memoir I dedicated to her, the upcoming gathering in Eugene to mark ten years.
During grad school, Luisely took me to St. Columba Catholic Church in Oakland. An elder there had once said to her:
You have the gift of tears. Don’t ever let anyone take that away from you.
In Eugene this past weekend, eight of us gathered round and let this gift flow freely as we shared stories and song, smiles and sobbing. Her mom, her widower, an uncle, an aunt, two college friends, two beloveds who had never met Amy: not a dry eye in the circle.
On this trip, we learned that leatherback turtles—rare, cryptic, impossibly large—have roamed the coast of Point Reyes. I dream of meeting one, though they don’t come to shore here as the elephant seals do, and spotting one in the Pacific Ocean seems as improbable as the existence of a 2,000-pound, 9-foot-long sea turtle. Violence is like this, and beauty too: massive and tiny, blatant and hidden, all at once.**
⛅
From a bottomless repository of memories, Amy’s mom offered this one at the end of our gift-filled gathering. It was just another sunny day on our Californian college campus. Amy stood in the quad, face to the sky, enraptured in its glory, too beautiful not to behold. She’d known her whole life that tomorrow was not guaranteed. She looked around. Everyone was rushing to their next destination. Not a single person paused to look up, not even for a moment. Mom, she said, it was so sad.
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira tells a similar story. Cradling a seemingly dead hummingbird in her hands while walking through another Californian college campus, nobody stopped to share her awe.
An ex post facto reason that my memoir is dedicated to Amy and the hummingbirds.
In Elaine Scarry’s estimation, under-appreciation is a far graver error of beauty than over-appreciation, for “the perceiver [of beauty] is led to a more capacious regard for the world” (48).
Dear friend, patient reader, I don’t know if we’ve gone anywhere in the span of this long letter. All I can do is thank you for this millimeter of expansion. I hope you feel it too.
Til the next quarter moon,
~Chenxing
*(1) My sister-in-law texted out of the blue to propose that we read it together (2) right after I listened to Priya Parker’s interview with Ezra Klein, at which point (3) I remembered that the L2BB students had drawn on the book’s insights to craft their in-person symposium. Raised by a Buddhist-Hindu-New Age Indian mom and an evangelical Christian Midwestern American dad, Parker brings her personal and professional experience in conflict resolution to bear on The Art of Gathering. If I’d known that a cherished mentor, Leng Lim, is cited in the book, it would have met the rare four-nudge standard.
**I’m thinking of the Presidio in its glistening beauty, where Executive Order 9066 was initiated. I’m thinking, too, of James Okumura’s reflections on Point Reyes’ erased history of pre-WWII Japanese American residents. James created the kintsugi lotus for May We Gather. We chanced to meet at the Chautauqua Institute last summer, when I was giving a talk and he was teaching at the art studio. He had moved to southwest New York after many years in what I now know is also Tim and Sherry’s neighborhood.
