Not Being Ready

I wasn’t ready.

That’s probably the most honest way to start. I wasn’t ready to lead anything when this Sangha first formed back in 2013. We filed the paperwork. We chose the name. We set the intention. But I wasn’t ready. I was still building my life. Still building my sense of self. Still carrying all the noise that comes from living as a human being who wants to get it all figured out before stepping forward. Zen has a way of sitting quietly beside you while you convince yourself you’re not ready. It doesn’t argue. It doesn’t try to convince you. It just stays. Waiting. Like breath. Like the mountains. Like that low hum you can feel when you sit long enough in real silence. Not the silence you create by getting rid of noise, but the silence that’s always there underneath. Joel used to call that the hum beneath the hum. He had this silly, beautiful way of mixing theater-kid energy with moments of very real spiritual gravity. He would belt out Elton John at karaoke one night, then sit with someone’s grief the next morning like a stone in the riverbed, solid, unmoving, listening. I didn’t understand it then. I just thought he was eccentric. I didn’t see the deep stillness in him because I didn’t know how to find it in myself yet. But life has a way of making monks out of us when we’re not paying attention. After Joel’s passing, I quietly drifted away from the Sangha we had started together. Not out of disrespect. Not out of rejection. Out of… gravity. Out of the slow pull of life. Grief does that. You walk forward, but you also scatter. Your feet move while your center dissolves. What I didn’t realize was that Zen was still sitting beside me. Still humming. Still waiting. And then somewhere along the way, after loss layered upon loss, after all my plans started cracking open, I found myself sitting in an entirely different silence. Not the silence of things falling apart. Not the silence of trying to hold it together. But that deeper hum. The one that says: “This is it. This moment. This breath. This grief. This heartbeat. This is the Dharma.” It’s not that I became ready. It’s that the question of being ready simply faded. Zen doesn’t care if you’re ready. Zen simply asks: are you here? If you’re here, then that’s enough. If you’re breathing, that’s enough. If you can witness your own fear without sprinting away from it, that’s enough. If you can feel your chest tighten when someone asks you to lead, and instead of performing, you simply stay, that’s enough. I don’t lead this Fellowship because I’m particularly wise. I lead because I’m willing to stay. That’s the whole secret. People don’t need a guru who can explain the entire cosmos. They need someone who can sit beside them while the bottom falls out. Someone who doesn’t flinch when the grief shows up at 3am. Someone who can hold silence without needing to fill it with shiny answers. Zen never asked me to be perfect. It never asked me to shave my head, or memorize koans, or build a monastery. It simply asked: “Can you remain present in your own life?” That’s it. Presence is the robe. Presence is the Dharma talk. Presence is the sermon. Presence is the authority. I wear a sports jacket and a cabby hat. I sit in nature. I walk these Colorado mountains and listen to that same hum Joel used to speak of. I still pray the Rosary most mornings, because it grounds me. I don’t need to resolve the paradox between Catholicism and Zen. Both teach presence. Both teach humility. Both teach surrender. The forms are different. The core is the same. When people come to me now – some curious, some wounded, some skeptical – I don’t feel pressure to perform. I feel an invitation to simply sit with them. Because Zen isn’t a performance. It’s not a product. It’s the art of staying human inside the mess of being human. I often hear people talk about “mindfulness” like it’s some productivity hack. Another lifehack to get ahead. To optimize. To “manage your stress.” That’s not Zen. Zen doesn’t teach you to manage your stress. Zen teaches you to sit inside your stress. To feel your jaw clench and your gut twist, and to remain right there. Not to fix it. Not to explain it. Not to reframe it. Just to be with it. And in that simple act of presence, something shifts. Not because you control it, but because you stop trying to control it. That’s the koan. That’s the teaching. That’s the still mind that took me decades to discover. The Fellowship has been sitting quietly all this time. Not dead. Not gone. Waiting. Just like Zen waits for us. And now, as I finally step forward, not because I’m ready, but because I’m present, I realize this Sangha doesn’t need to be big. It doesn’t need to be flashy. It doesn’t need to be anything more than what it is. A space. A circle. A quiet place where people can sit with their grief, their joy, their confusion, and their breath. A place where we don’t pretend to have the answers, but where we promise to stay present inside the questions. That is the Dharma. That is Zen. That is what we offer. And that is enough.