i got this letter from my nana today. i thought id share it with you. it made me cry, she’s such a sweetheart. i miss her so much, but i thought you might get something out of hearing how she talks to me.
take care,
rag
hey, baby,
i hope you’re settling in nicely. i was just thinking about you, and wanted to give you some nice words in case you’re lonely. it can get lonely, these days. here’s some things that will help you remember that you’re not alone.
the meditation hall, the container that meditation happens within, is a character. we know this to be true because each meditation hall smells a little different, has different drafts, and the shadows land differently at different times of day.
just as each individual, each buddha within its walls is a character, and the sangha expresses the shape of the community’s character, the meditation hall is a character whose walls contain the character of the teaching that has happened there. even if no dharma talk has ever been given in the space, in this space, dharma is always being expounded. the particular shape of the dharma being expounded in the meditation hall continuously is called character. we say it is neutral, but in fact it has a shape that is exactly its own.
zen’s emphasis on shikan taza, and the absence of guided imagery during the meditation period, allows each mind to settle in its own way. each buddha is the container for the teachings, myriad ways of seeing and being seen, arising interdependently, and liberation is not dependent on following instructions, save the ones one follows to remain upright, if one needs them, be they remembered words, embodied shapes, or pictures of buddhas practicing upright.
within the meditation hall, the sangha arranges itself into the shape suggested by its walls, which were built exactly as a container for the sangha from the suggestions of the sangha. a buddha settles into sangha in the ways that the sangha suggests, and the shape of this settling is a suggestion that informs the sangha. countless momentary interactions, with people, with architecture, with idea and interpretation—nothing but dharma unfolding, and this unfolding is a character.
i know, sometimes people say you’re being a character, but you’re just being yourself. i see you, baby. miss you, sweetheart.
the moment a new monk, or the visitor from another temple, enters the meditation hall, the character of the hall is revealed: where are its boundaries rigid? where are there walls that adjust to the needs of the moment?
notice how quickly the seasoned monk moves to correct. notice the subtle signs in their behavior that they are adjusting to something, to understand it. beyond the postures and the mudras of the service, and the way the bells are sounded and clappers clapped, what other shapes is the sangha embodying that are shaped by the character of the meditation hall?
the new monk, or the visitor from another temple, might do well to view each interaction in a new space as a kind of guided meditation that reveals the character of the meditation hall—the character is being performed, and can be perceived—a perfect character study. someone is being meditated upon, and decisions are being made, just as one is meditating upon the space one moves through and making decisions.
seeing these encounters as guided meditations, that sitting in stillness prepared us to move through, how is one’s response to being guided, in the way one’s being guided? what is the character of the response to or the receipt of the dharma talk that one’s movement through the environment offers the sangha? where is the friction, or the resolution of friction, at the edges of the interaction between your character and the character of the meditation hall, and the sangha, and the buddhas within?
where does one notice resistance or redirection? where does one feel a curtain yield or a window open. breathing the shared air, understanding how air cycles through a space, understand how generosity flows through the space, and how it is redirected, and why.
when a monk asks questions, their questions reveal their character. when the sangha responds, the response reveals the character of the sangha. the character of the meditation hall is revealed in the particular way a footstep echoes, or the way the line of a tan invites us over, and these are reflected in the character of the sangha, and the buddhas within. a cast of characters with a certain character.
notice your capacity for kindness, child, and notice the way that kindness breaks you open when it reaches deep inside you. be reachable, honey. be generous, baby. knowing the way that kindness breaks you, consider the way that being forced open breaks you, and sit with that. i know you do.
have you ever had moments where you’ve been forced open, or moments where kindness broke you open? have you ever accidentally broken someone open with kindness? have you ever forced someone open with kind intentions? i know you’re thinking about these things, baby. that reflects kindly on your character.
don’t worry about performing the fiction of independence. try to abandon the performance of invulnerability.
the earth needs us to be vulnerable, right now, sweetie.
can you hear it?
i wish i could hug you.
nana loves you.
you be good now, and you just live your life, and be the best person you can. it’s your life, and no one can live it for you.
don’t forget to think of your old nana once in a while.
as a practicing buddhist, “leave no trace” is a guiding principle embedded into every teaching: leave no physical trace of your passage through the busy world, and leave no stinky teaching behind that muddies the waters of the dharma.
how do we practice this, living as we do with the legacy of colonialism, cultural appropriation, and industrial capitalism? do i join a monastery that maintains a culture derived from practices developed thousands of miles away within a separate but equally asymmetrical power structure as medieval Japan?
maybe—but what other options are there?
considering that i was born and raised in California, what models for living are available for living a leave-no-trace lifestyle in this place?
Let’s consider a moment like this.
dōgen, the go-to teacher in my particular subsect of zen buddhism, the Sōto school, was sharing his wisdom from a temple in a remote area of Echizen province in Japan in the 13th century. consider what was happening in California at that time.
California was arguably one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse regions in the world. people had lived here for millennia, and by 1500CE (3 centuries after Dōgen’s birth), there were somewhere around 80 distinct languages and cultural groups living in this place: in the coastal region; in the great valley between the coastal ranges and the Sierra Nevada; in myriad river valleys, watersheds, grasslands, and oak groves.
Consider this: upon arrival, on ships and overland, European colonists encountered a land that they believed to be pristine and uninhabited.
Let that sink in.
One of the most culturally diverse regions on Earth.
For anyone paying mindful attention (as we are entreated to do), this would seem to provide a textbook example of “leave-no-trace.” Look around. Where are the crumbling monuments and scorched places that a region with 80 distinct cultures would be expected to contain?
If you have the capacity to think about this for even a moment, it is likely to be almost unimaginable.
that being said, it would be inaccurate and unfair to say that the people who inhabited this place left no trace—on the contrary, the traces are there, if one knows where to look.
Let’s consider the traces left behind, in California, by the 80 or so distinct cultures that inhabited this place for millennia, before the ships came.
They left behind fire-shaped oak woodlands, park-like oak savannas with open understories, that early European observers admired and assumed were natural. They were natural, but they were also made—through precise, seasonally timed cultural burning that suppressed encroaching conifers, stimulated acorn production, and maintained the grassland-woodland mosaic that supported enormous biodiversity.
They left behind a superabundance of large game. The astonishing density of elk, deer, and pronghorn reported by early contact-era observers was not an accident of wilderness conditions—it was the managed outcome of burn regimens, selective harvest, and spiritual protocols around killing that functioned as de facto conservation law.
They left behind salmon run integrity—weir systems, harvest techniques, and first-catch ceremonies functioned together as a distributed watershed management system. The ceremonies were societal self-regulation—embedding catch limits and seasonal closures as cultural touchstones.
We knock on doors to ask for candy. They practiced similar rituals to ensure next season’s catch.
they left behind camas and brodaea meadows. These extensive bulb plantings, which fed both humans and animals across enormous areas, were cultivated through selective harvest, replanting, and burning. Europeans saw them as wildflower meadows—they were cultivated gardens in disguise.
Leave no trace, indeed.
They left behind tarweed and clover patches, in distinct patterns. Intentional burning created a patchwork of early-succession forb communities across hillsides—maximizing seed yield while simultaneously creating the habitat that makes species diversity possible. The quilt pattern that Europeans noticed in the landscape was an agricultural design, cultivated by people with intention and systems wisdom.
They left behind a near-universal network of dense, structurally complex riparian zones—willows, alders, sedges. These corridors were the circulatory system of the landscape, and they were kept open and healthy by people who understood the value of stewardship and systems thinking to their lifeways.
They left behind shell midden topography: shellmounds are found along the Bay, the coast, the rivers. They are features of the landscape now, that support unique alkaline plant communities. These indigenous communities had their landfills, but what they leave behind is kind of an accidental monument to valuable plant species that grow nowhere else.
They left behind stands of elderberry and hazel. Both were actively managed—elderberry for food and medicine, hazel for basket-making. Their distribution across the landscape reflects human intention. Where you find dense hazel stands, you are standing in someone’s workshop—again, disguised as natural selection.
They also left behind absence: absence of erosion signatures in pre-contact sediment cores. Paleoecological cores from California lakes and estuaries show remarkably stable sediment profiles through the pre-contact period—low erosion, stable watersheds, consistent organic input. In contrast, the colonial period shows up as an abrupt, catastrophic sediment disruption. These 80 cultures left behind measurable stability in the geological record. The entrance of Europeans is literally visible at the sedimentary level.
They left behind black, carbon-rich soils in valley and foothill community sites—soils darkened and enriched by millennia of habitation, burning, composting, and refuse incorporation. These patches grow differently than surrounding soils. Farmers and gardeners notice them. They are slowly-accumulated signatures of long residence—in the best way: they continue to support biodiversity and utility to the stewards who tend them.
Landscape. Systems. People. Intention. All working together for millennia. 80 distinct cultures.
Europeans arrive and see nothing but a natural landscape.
I’m saying this over and over again because it’s so easy to gloss over if you don’t make the effort to consider the alternative.
What is the alternative?
Let’s consider the legacy left behind by the people on ships (and overland) who saw a pristine place and sought to save the inhabitants from their sins.
If we consider the legacy of a supposedly civilized people;
and if we consider that what was left behind was left behind by a diversity of peoples whose numbers were diminished by 95% within 150 years of contact with the (supposed) savior peoples whose numbers arrived on ships (and overland);
what would be the legacy of the people who intervened in the millennia-long experiment of California’s indigenous peoples?
Let’s consider the legacy of an intervening people, if their numbers were suddenly diminished by 95%. Let’s consider (if we consider the intervening people to be more civilized) what we would expect to have found:
(I hope fellow buddhists are practicing mindfulness here)
Where are the prisons? The structures whose purpose is the forcible removal of human beings from the social body, if we assume that such removal is a necessary function of civilization? No pre-contact California culture is known to have required one. This begs the question: what kind of society needs this many cages?
Where are the parking lots? Surely an ecosystem that supports 80 different cultures must require an impermeable surface with zero ecological function, and a thermal mass that raises ambient temperature, that exceeds the footprint of habitable buildings, to carry out its work of saving a population from their sins. Surely they would have needed a warehouse for their means of travel.
Where are the landfills? We found shellmounds that became soil, ecology, and monument in one. What about their accumulated poisons, leachates, methane—sealed from the biological processes that would otherwise transform them?
Where are the strip malls—the commercial vernacular of a healthy market economy—built for a lifespan of 30 years, and already obsolescing before completion? We don’t see the parking lots (larger than the buildings themselves), but surely we would see some signs of commerce.
Where are the stadiums—the enormous structures used for roughly 20 days per year, built with public money, named for corporations, demolished when the team demands a newer one? The Romans had their amphitheater, that was apparently well-used—where did these people display their spectacle?
Where are the hospitals? is it possible that these people did not allow their baseline conditions—diet, air, water, social cohesion, meaningful work—to degrade so severely that industrial-scale intervention became necessary to sustain normal human function? Did they not live in such a way that made such monuments to care necessary?
Where are the highways? Roman roads are still visible from satellites. American interstates will be legible to geologists a millennium from now. Impermeable, like parking lots, severing watersheds, fragmenting habitat, producing runoff laced with tire particulate that is now measurable in the tissues of Pacific salmon. Surely civilized people would have needed a structure to move vehicles between parking lots, no?
Where are the golf courses? Doesn’t a civilized culture need a chemically maintained monoculture on land that could support hundreds of species, with water consumption needs on an agricultural scale—poisoned earth, to support a certain shade of turf, for the leisure of a few?
Where is the advertising infrastructure: billboards, signage, the entire visual apparatus of commercial persuasion permanently installed in the landscape? How would people have known what products to purchase to maintain legibility as citizens and support the corporate infrastructure?
Where are the Superfund sites? Certainly, a section of the continent that was home to 80 distinct cultures would have needed places where industrial processes so thoroughly poisoned land, water, and soil that the collective body would have designated them national sacrifice zones requiring generations of remediation—if remediation is even possible.
Shellmounds? Were these people even human?
Let’s pause, and reflect.
Eighty distinct cultures. Eighty different languages. Eighty different cosmologies, kinship structures, ceremonial calendars, ways of knowing. Not one people with one answer—eighty peoples with eighty answers, none of which required a prison, a landfill, or a Superfund site.
This is the part that is almost impossible to hold in the mind.
Dōgen’s monastery is a monoculture: an island of shared language and isolated cultural identity. The colonial project is a monoculture: a multivalent operation of power, subjugation, and extraction at industrial scale. Both operating from the assumption that there is one correct way, transmissible as doctrine, applicable universally, independent of place.
The eighty cultures of California suggest something the monastery and the colonial project both missed: that diversity of approach, held within shared relationship to place, is itself the technology of leave-no-trace. Not one answer refined to perfection—many answers, in conversation with one another and with the land. The oak savanna is not a monoculture. Its stability is a product of the diversity of its understory.
California today is one of the most diverse places on earth—again, still, differently. The question the land is asking has not changed.
What is meant by leave-no-trace? What traces have we been asked to reflect on?
From where we are, in this present moment,
what would buddha do?
Where would dōgen go to dispense his kitchen wisdom?
Does one attempt to move a civilization whose legacy is prisons and superfund sites toward a gentler stewardship?
What of the legacy of 80 cultures, across millennia, who left behind healthy fisheries, and pastoral oak groves that supported a diverse ecology?
What is a buddhist, who devotes themselves to leaving no trace, to do?
