I've been asked what is my favorite page from the book, and this is my favorite illustration -- or at least part of it. It's funny, because when I was taking painting lessons when living in Taipei, my teacher had painted a composition of wilted lotuses as a demonstration for a classmate who happened to be a Buddhist monk. The teacher gave a disclaimer saying normally we wouldn't choose such a subject to give another person, but as a practitioner of Buddhism who appreciates the concept of impermanence, death and rebirth, the student wouldn't mind.

The thing is that in Chinese culture, when giving works of art, one needs to be mindful of the meaning that could be conveyed by the subject. For example, if you give a recently married couple an painting of a pair of a mandarin ducks, which symbolize conjugal happiness, but the birds have clipped wings or are anatomically missing sections of feathers, it might be interpreted as hoping their marriage is short-lived.

Wilting flowers can mean a wish for someone's demise or predict a loss of good fortune, a waning of one's sun. But for me, it can also be beautiful. As Adrienne Maree Brown describes the role of mushrooms and decomposition, what is toxic, broken, decaying, and no longer serving life can still be used. It need not be wasted. It can be processed back into the wholeness of living. And I think of that when I look at this image. Brokenness only looks bad when I see it from a narrow point of view. When I expand my perspective to include the act of processing what's broken back into the whole, it looks beautiful.

There are many ways for strength to manifest itself. The one that is helping me most right now is strength through resilience.⁠⁠

"One of the deepest habitual patterns that we have is the feeling that the present moment is not good enough." - Pema Chodron

My son swings between being completely in the moment and desperately wanting to be outside of it. I suppose we all fall somewhere on this spectrum, and maybe this feels especially pronounced as a young person in the modern world with minimal agency over what happens to us.

This perspective has made me empathize with my son's frustration and also served as a reminder to myself to not be in a rush to mentally check out of the moment. It only comes once. There is only now.

Jamie Anderson writes that grief is "all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest."

This suppression of affection and inseparability can feel so painful and lonely. When the felt sense of love lacks expression -- whether through cherished activity, relationship, or object -- one can be overcome with deep, deep sadness. That is grief. And grief can be expressed where love cannot.

It bears reminding that each of us has a song in our hearts. It doesn’t have to be a happy song or any kind of song, but a song nonetheless that no one can sing but ourselves.⁠

Inspired by Antonio Machado's "Traveller, there is no path"

Traveller, the path is your tracks⁠
And nothing more.⁠
Traveller, there is no path⁠
The path is made by walking.⁠
By walking you make a path⁠
And turning, you look back⁠
At a way you will never tread again⁠
Traveller, there is no road⁠
Only wakes in the sea.⁠

"Self care" is an interesting concept to consider, especially from a Buddhist perspective that teaches us the self doesn't actually exist. If that's the case, then what does Buddhism have to say about taking care of ourselves?

In part of the story of Siddhartha and his path to enlightenment, he renounces his position of prosperity and wealth in order to practice extreme asceticism. He refuses all worldly comforts, including basic necessities like food and drink, with the intention of transcending the limitations of our existence. It is said that he became so weakened and emaciated that he could no longer participate in his practice and was saved only by accepting an offering of kheer (rice pudding). Though in choosing to eat, drink, and nurture his body, Siddhartha was ostracized and looked down upon by the ascetics, the experience supported his way to understanding the Middle Path.

Just as we can't gain perspective or alleviate our suffering through extreme hedonism, neither can we do so with extreme denial. The Buddhist perspective of self teaches us that it is a meeting point of many things: matter, processes, environment, thoughts, feelings, experiences, relationships, etc. all interacting with one another to give rise to an ever changing, conscious form.Self care, from the Buddhist perspective, is therefore not to glorify the self or drown out our fear and pain with enjoyment, but rather to provide the fuel necessary for the self to do the greatest good for the longest time that it can.

For instance, let's say that I normally budget $100 a month of various spa treatments to help me relax and look my best. It could be a facial, nail treatments, or a massage. At the end of two weeks, my nails are chipped again, and by the end of the month, my neck and shoulder pain are back from all the stress I've accumulated. Maybe I should wonder why I feel constantly stressed in the first place. Maybe I can examine more deeply into why it's important for my appearance to look a certain way. Instead of spending $100 a month for these services, I wonder what difference I can make if I put the funds toward counseling services instead.

In a different example, let's say I spend an hour and half every week visiting a friend at her house, watching a reality TV show together over a bottle of wine. We laugh at the contestants, ridicule the manufactured drama, and complain about work. By the end of the night, I feel superior to complete strangers whose lives are a bigger mess than my own and somehow know nothing more on how my friend is doing except what she has to complain about. I wonder would the time be better spent just going for a twenty-minute walk together instead. Would we feel more connected with our town, exploring the streets, greeting neighbors in passing? Would our bodies be healthier for the exercise? Would I have more to talk about with my friend, using the time as a chance to learn about how her family is doing or what hobbies she wants to pursue?

There are many ways in which we can take care of ourselves, but there are differences between hiding our pain or distracting ourselves from our own discomfort, and creating balance in our lives. It may not seem like much, but we can always do small things every day that make huge, long-term differences. And that makes them not so small after all.

Inspired by George Bernard Shaw⁠

After I finished university, I turned down an opportunity to work in corporate finance for a large defense company. Instead, I ended up taking a job as a micro-business advisor to a women's association. I lived in a town of less than 60 families, a 5-hour hike through the mountains to the nearest town with an internet connection, a bank, and a hospital. ⁠

I thought I'd find myself there, but I didn't.⁠ I thought that becoming the opposite of who I was would be the answer, but it wasn't.⁠

Our true selves are not walking around outside of us, somewhere for us to discover -- complete and whole. We are the accumulation of decisions, actions, words, changes, and connections that we make. If you're not happy with where you are today, just realize that it's not necessary to rebel like I did. The change you seek can be clarified with honest reflection, small investments in time and curiosity about yourself and your relationship to the world around you.⁠

Inspired by a quote from C.S. Lewis from his heart-touching work, "A Grief Observed," that he wrote following the death of his wife

Though C.S. Lewis was a Christian writer, I love that Buddhism also teaches us that when we get angry, we are in fact suffering immense pain. ⁠

Anger in itself is neither good nor bad. All emotions are informative. All emotions are a form of energy, and like all energies, can be transmuted. If we sit with our anger long enough to get to know it and the sorrow inherent to anger, it can show us the way to transmute it into right action.⁠

Have you ever lived through a kind of pain that throws the world off balance, the kind that shatters and reshapes a previously stable worldview into one that seems to have new rules or new conditions and severely distorted your sense of self?

Welcome back, as I resume new comics this month! Over the summer, I came across a story from a woman named Torria on "Humans of New York." She said of her childhood, "I was just going through so much, you know. Horrible things were being done to me. Horrible, terrible things. So I’d use whatever I could. I’d pay attention to anything that made me happy. That’s one thing I can do: pay attention. It comes from something within me. We all have it. But you know, I tap into it. I still do. I just took a picture of a flower this morning. I’m so grateful. I’m telling you, I’m so grateful that I came out of the darkness. Maybe my journey wasn't to make money or to be successful or anything. It was just to recover."

I just read and re-read that statement, and came back to it weeks and even months later: "My journey wasn't to make money or to be successful or anything. It was just to recover."

And it brought to mind how unfair life can be. How different our experiences are, how due to "man's fault" -- the fault of humanness, our ability to inflict unspeakable pain on someone, to plunge another being into darkness -- someone might never fulfill some potential for greatness. It's just not fair.

There is no known reason that I can understand which explains why I was born into the life I have, and the opportunities availed to me, while somewhere else, another woman who might have been a greater artist, a more heart-touching poet, or a more nurturing mother, is struggling to keep herself alive in a civil war.

I can't judge the world on the basis of fairness. It would break my heart and drive me crazy with anguish every time. Instead, I've been trying to look at it from the Confucian perspective that each of us must simply "discharge one's duties" in life. I return to Torria and how the darkness of her childhood kept her in shadows from which she was lucky to emerge. Michael Meade says, "The fateful event of being wounded early in life creates the need for a deep healing process that becomes the path of awakening for each person." No, it wasn't fair that she suffered through such darkness. It was wrong, and she deserved better. And at the same time, she discharged her duty to herself to recover. And who can say that that's not enough? It's more than enough. It's amazing.

So what is the implication for someone whose "path of awakening" is more accessible? I guess I, too, must discharge my duties be responsible to myself and because I have the means, to live beholden to those around me. No, I can't make life fair, and I can't make the whole world just, but I can make some good for others through good work. And maybe that's all that I should expect.

Inspired by Olga Jacoby's letters, from "Words in Pain," that were written at the end of her life as she faced terminal illness

I don't want to romanticize another being's pain and suffering. But insofar that pain is an inevitable byproduct of loving in this life, I also can't deny that pain and suffering is a remarkable teacher that makes compassion, and therefore progress, possible.

So many people are suffering right now, sometimes from the lasting effects of our upbringing and lived experiences that makes fear our constant companion; and sometimes from pain inflicted by others who are moving about propelled by their own suffering. And then, there's also the pain inflicted on all of us in the modern world, by nearly invisible systems that benefit a few at the expense of many. These are my teachers, and this pain isn't wasted.

If anything, I know we are made richer for witnessing it within ourselves and in others, and in this richness, in this abundance of feeling, we learn what we ought to do.

The older I get, the more clearly I find that the wisdom in rest is not in simply restoring and fortifying myself for the next "round," but moreso in taking stock of my situation and considering what is truly exhausting me. Is it my ego rebelling against inconvenience? Or maybe it really is a misalignment between my habits and the soul? Allowing myself to have nothing to do -- making time for nothing to do -- is a gift, because it gives me the chance to engage with silence and clarity.

Some days it feels hard to go softly with a compassionate heart. This quote by Krishna Das captures this dilemma so well. There are still ways to ripen, even if I have to drag myself there.

Is there a difference? Can you be one but not the other? Which would you pick if you could only choose one?

To me, Dr. Jaiya John's poetic proclamation "Daughter Drink This Water" read as an invitation to a celebration of womanhood, an embracing of everything from the bitterness of birth to the weight of expectation to the complex joy we carry through life, it called to that part of me that yearns to simply be and live free. But why women in particular?

Having been denied equal rights to men for so long, women in countless societies have long held the necessity of using marriage as a means to meeting basic needs, like food, housing, security. From this basic dynamic stemmed the burgeoning expectation for women to look, act, dress, think, and speak a certain way in order to be considered suitable for marriage. The more a woman conformed to the highest standards of these expectations, the greater the chances of a comfortable position for her later in life. Fast forward several generations, humanity has made significant progress in these areas, but we still grapple with the question of how to be a woman.

Every year, we dedicate billions of dollars on industries that thrive by creating, changing, and recycling standards about how a woman ought to look in any given season. For instance, in the 1950s, only 7% of women in the US dyed their hair. After an aggressive marketing campaign by Clairol, that percentage jumped to 40% by 1970. Hair removal is another instance in which the fashion and commercial industry started attacking the appearance of hair in women's underarms in 1915, which extended over the years to legs and bikini lines, as unsightly and decidedly unfeminine. By the 1980s, 80% of women under the age of 35 removed some of their body hair to improve their looks. The most mind-boggling of all is the constant push and pull of whether our skin is too dark (in many Eastern cultures) or too light (in many Western cultures) to be considered beautiful, and the associated creams, oils, gels, and treatments to achieve the ideal skin tone. Additionally, keeping up with the rapid pace of women's fashion has led to a consistent need for us to change our wardrobe with every season, leading to highly detrimental "fast fashion" practices that are wreaking havoc on the environment.

What's unfortunate to me is not just that so many of us spend our lives living with the inheritance of our disenfranchised past, but that instead of lifting women up and scaling back standards and expectations of our appearance, men are also being targeted in greater and greater droves. Fashion and beauty products for men have found mainstream purchase, likely as a rebellion against that other expectation of what "real men" ought to be like as well.

It's my hope that someday there will be a meeting in the middle, that it becomes more about choice and self expression in beauty and fashion, rather than a fear of looking too masculine, too feminine, or too whatever to be accepted, attractive, and loved that drives our desire to look a certain way. I go back to the original quote and its intent: Daughters (and sons), we already are Love. Just as the ocean is water, we need not go elsewhere to find Love.

I've been wending my slow way through bell hooks' book, "All About Love." Something that she talks about in the beginning is how she realized after working extensively with a therapist, she was that she was never loved by her family. She never learned how to love from her parents. She explains that while she received care, support, praise, and affection from her parents, she also received extremely confusing expressions of "love" that was saddled with Not applicable, mental, and emotional violence, and perpetuated generational trauma.

At first, it felt a little shocking to me -- even disloyal -- to read that the author even came to a realization like this, to admit that the people who raised her and nurtured her in all the ways that society expects parents to, was not actually love. Who was she to decide how her parents expressed their love anyhow? But after thinking on it more, her perspective began to make more sense. Most relationships in society are built on a transactional basis, and from a certain perspective a lot of them make sense. If I pay my electric bill on time, I expect the light to turn on when I flip the switch. It's a transaction. But when transactions become the basis for a more intimate relationship like that of a parent and a child, I can see how it can quickly leech love from the picture.

It may seem like a trivial thing at first, but the transactional mindset can become a habit in many ways. It can start as a simple expectation of how my son should behave based on what I am doing for him: If I treat him to ice cream after school, he should be on his best behavior at the ice cream parlor. This kind of framing is a transaction, an expectation of one behavior in exchange for a benefit. And I wonder if this habitual kind of thinking easily grows over time into larger expectations of how children conduct themselves in life later on.

For instance, it is an often-told story in many immigrant families of parents who toil through years of hard, Not applicable labor, to give their children a brighter future -- so they can go to medical school or law school or become a software engineer -- only to become disillusioned when their children decide to switch to a less stable career, fail to perform well enough, or feel bitter towards their parents because of the pressure and burden of guilt.

So what then, is a more appropriate way to frame a relationship in order for love to be present?

Love as a state of being that emerges, as Amit Pagedar describes, when "comparison, envy, insecurity, fear, and hate disappear." Rupert Spira describes the love we feel as the "felt sense of a lack of separation." bell hooks shares the act of love as "to extend oneself for the spiritual growth of another."

Love as a state, love as a feeling, love as an action. I like all three definitions, and to combine them in my relationship with my son, is to remove expectation, to see him not as a separate person I'm transacting with, to help him grow spiritually. To take my very mundane ice cream outing example, instead of feeling betrayed by my son or painting him as ungrateful, I could frame the entire experience as something entirely different:

1. I think taking my son out for ice cream could be an enjoyable experience for both of us.
2. He begins to act in a way that is not appropriate to the outing.
3. I therefore slow down and help him and myself find emotional balance.
4. The outing is postponed and revisited at a later date.

I can choose not to saddle the outing with pre-defined expectations. I can change the goal from "having a nice time together eating ice cream" to "working through a moment of emotional dis-regulation." And I can always try again.

To put this kind of perspective into practice after so many years of programming my understanding of love and relationships is for me, seriously uphill work. But it is also a very liberating perspective, to see love not as a finite well to draw from, that can in times of conflict and difficulty feels like it could run dry, but as an endless and ever changing ocean to swim in with everyone else. It's empowering to feel that I am capable of such love. I hope you know that you are, too.

From Teaching my Mother how to Give Birth by Warsan Shire

I came across this poem by Bertolt Brecht, German playwright and poet who lived through both World Wars, and fearing persecution for voicing his political criticisms through theatre, fled to Southern California only to be targeted and surveilled during the McCarthy era's Second Red Scare. I can only imagine all that he saw through what he assuredly felt was an extremely dark period for his country, and still he maintains a motto, a mantra to remember that expression can and will persist. And my impression is that it will persist not in spite of, but also because of that darkness.

"Motto"
by Bertolt Brecht

In the dark times
Will there be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.

So, if you find yourself concerned about what your world is going through. It bears reminding that no matter what happens. Still we sing. Be it only a whisper, be it only in your heart— Sing. Sing. Sing.

Being a witness to someone else's pain is, at its core, uncomfortable. Our ability to sense the tragedy of another being's suffering seems innate. We can feel the pain of an animal being hunted as prey. We can imagine ourselves fleeing a war zone or putting our children in boats, because contrary to all human expectation, as Warsan Shire says, "the water is safer than the land."

In many of us, witnessing pain can trigger a desire to do anything to diminish the discomfort of seeing it. We can simply look away and decide not to think about it because there's nothing we can do to help. We can even deny their claim to feel pain, because of this or that reason. We can get defensive and protect ourselves from being beholden to another person's pain. We sometimes diminish their experience by comparing it to what we consider more painful ones. There are even limits to our ability to feel compassion. We ask them to move on or get over it. We could even delight in another person's pain, because sometimes it's easier to believe that people deserve what happens to them, rather than acknowledge that unfairness and paradox is built into our very existence.

Even when we acknowledge pain, it's sometimes done in a manner again to diminish our own discomfort rather than to explore and understand, to find out what exactly is needed in that situation. On a small scale, I see this kind of behavior in myself as a parent, trying to lessen their pain by jumping immediately to try to fix or soothe, or distracting their attention by focusing on the brighter side or looking forward something more pleasant.

I think that while it is possible to focus too much on pain and wallow in the feeling in ways that end up being more harmful than helpful, what most people desire first is simply to be believed. The moment a victim is believed by another primes the relationship for trust. This doesn't necessarily mean the problem will solved, justice will be served, and their pain will go away. But there's the opening for resilience and perhaps some day, recovery through the knowledge that their pain has not gone unseen.