One Week Back

One week ago I left Blue Cliff Monastery, where I had spent the last two years training as a monastic in the Plum Village tradition, and came home to New York City. I disrobed. I am a layperson again.

This is not an abandonment of practice. I want to integrate contemplative training into a sustainable lay life, and to find out, honestly and in public, what that actually looks like. This post is the first of many. The previous post on this site was a technical build log; this one is me.

Why write this down at all

Because the transition itself is worth documenting. There is a lot written about going to a monastery and not much about coming back. I would rather record this period while it is happening than reconstruct it later, smoothed over. So I'll be writing here regularly, including about the parts that aren't going well.

What week one actually felt like

The thing that surprised me most is what held. I expected the city to knock me around more than it has. The calm that built up over two years turned out to be sturdier than I anticipated.

That said, it got tested. Over the weekend I walked around Flushing, Queens, and it was genuinely overwhelming. People everywhere, noise, commotion, more stimulation than I'd taken in for a long time. What I had to come back to was the simplest thing I know: breathing in, breathing out. It didn't make Flushing quieter. It gave me somewhere to stand inside it.

Waiting has been an unexpected pleasure. I find myself enjoying it, just standing in a line or sitting on a platform with nothing to do. I watch other people struggle with the same minutes, fidgeting, reaching for their phones. Then, a few days in, I noticed the same pull in me. I caught it and came back. That's the practice, I think: not being immune, just noticing sooner.

The computer is harder. This is my first stretch of consistent computer access in nearly two years, and the pull is real. It has already cost me some sleep. I'm still working on it, and I don't have a tidy resolution to report.

The fundamentals are in flux. Nutrition, meal times, exercise, sleep — all of it got shaken up by the move and is slowly settling. Most of my actual hours this week went to decluttering my room and listing things for sale online, keeping my possessions few and intentional. And the best part of the week has been time with a loved one.

Here is the honest part: I have sat in formal meditation exactly once since returning. I'm being gentle with myself about that. Over the summer I'll work toward a schedule similar to the monastery's, adapted to lay life, rather than forcing it in week one.

The year ahead

I'm treating the next twelve months as soil-building: making the ground good enough that things can grow later. Concretely, that means:

• Stabilizing lay life and maintaining a consistent practice.
• Finding community.
• Training as a CNA starting this fall, the first step on a longer nursing pathway. I chose it for service, right livelihood, and daily, practical contact with suffering and with people.
• Researching how Buddhist sanghas actually work, through interviews with members and organizers. I want to understand communities before I ever try to build anything for them.
• Writing here, consistently.
• Experimenting with AI tooling. This site, and the multi-agent writing workflow behind it, are themselves experiments.

The question underneath all of this — the one I expect to spend the next decade on — is

how contemplative practice, community, and modern technology can coexist without corrupting one another.

Success this year looks like stability, consistency, community, learning, and the kind of credibility that only comes from lived experience. Not scale, revenue, or audience growth. Soil first.

An invitation

If any of these threads interest you — the practice, the nursing path, the sangha research, the AI experiments, or just the strange project of re-entering a city after two years of monastic life — you're welcome to follow along. There will be more on each of them. For now: one week in, breathing in, breathing out, and glad to be writing to you.