Year's end brings a reckoning with what remains unfinished.  The projects abandoned mid-flight, plans folded back into drawers, ideas that never crystallized. We live in a world that measures us by what we produce, and so incompletion arrives wearing the mask of failure.

But the hunger for completion is infinite. 

We often imagine that art is something we make. But your life is already shaping itself in every breath, every choice, every shift of attention.

Your life is already art.

There is a quiet wisdom in letting life move without interference.

Each attempt to fix or manage creates another complication. When you step back, a steadier rhythm becomes clear, one that does not rely on control.

Recently, I led a workshop on Zen and meditation at a local college. The students were open and inquisitive, but I could sense their apprehension about being beginners.

They spoke of meditation as a steep climb, wondering how to move from the frustrations of a novice to the calm of a master. I assured them that the mind of a beginner is the best place to be.

When we stand before a work of art, we might think we’re looking at something outside ourselves, be it a painting, a sculpture, or an image created by another. Yet what we see reflects the one who is seeing.

When we listen to music, we enter the flowing nature of time. A note sounds, fades, and is gone. Yet what we hear in each instant depends on what came before and what we anticipate will come next.

The work of opening the heart is at the root of Zen practice. This opening is inseparable from awareness itself.

It’s an invitation to loosen the carefully constructed image of who you think you are—an opportunity to dismantle the ego’s scaffolding, revealing the raw, flowing nature beneath.

Through Zen practice, I’ve come to see that the separation between myself and the world is merely a persistent thought.

The depth and vastness of life reveal themselves in the simplicity of everyday things. A cup on the table, light on a wall, a flower in a vase—each holds the entire universe if we look closely enough. Nothing is missing.