Practitioner first,
builder second.

I spent about two years training as a monastic in the Plum Village tradition, most of it at Blue Cliff Monastery. In the spring of 2026 I disrobed and came home to New York City, a layperson again. This isn't a leaving of the practice — it's an attempt to carry it into ordinary life, honestly and in public, and to find out what that actually looks like.

Before the robes there was another life: digital marketing, startups, the usual appetite for building and winning. The monastery didn't erase that instinct so much as reorder it. I came back wanting the same energy pointed at gentler things.

So this year is soil-building — making the ground good enough that things can grow later. Concretely: stabilizing a lay life and a daily practice, finding community, and training as a CNA this fall as the first step on a longer nursing path. I chose nursing for service, for right livelihood, and for daily, practical contact with people and with suffering. Alongside that I write — at Thresholds — and experiment with agentic AI tooling. This site, and the multi-agent workflow behind it, are themselves experiments.

Underneath all of it is one question I expect to spend a decade on:

How can contemplative practice, community, and modern technology coexist without corrupting one another?

Further out, I'd like to help establish a lay practice center in New York, and to build digital tools that serve sanghas rather than extract from them. I hold those lightly. Soil first.

If any of these threads interest you — the practice, the nursing path, the research into how communities actually work, or the strange project of re-entering a city after two years away — you're welcome to follow along.

Breathing in, breathing out, and glad you're here.