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A Journey from Zen Monk to Web Design

Kneeling on the floor across from my Roshi, the teaching monk at my monastery, in Kyoto Japan, it is just starting to get light out. We’ve already been up for several hours. Long enough to convince myself I’m awake. I repeat my koan to him in classical Japanese. The koan is the focus of our meditation. An unanswerable question, it is the primary teaching tool of Rinzai Zen monasteries. “Where will you go?” I pause for a beat, “I don’t care what anyone says, I’m going back to America”, I tell him.

He grunts his ascent and gives me my next koan. I passed.

The dialogue in the koan isn’t real. He wasn’t really asking me where I was going, and I wasn’t really saying I was going back to America. If I was going to loosely paraphrase that conversation, I would say something like, “what is your true nature when all is said and done?” “My true nature is what it has always been and only I can know it.” Something like that.

But just this one time I thought, what if I really did go back to America?

By then I had been in Japan for nearly ten years. Becoming a Zen monk had been my dream. I didn’t have a plan B. But things were changing. My training was changing. I was getting less and less time to focus on meditation and more and more time was spent teaching me to be a Japanese gentleman, writing Chinese poetry with a brush and so on.

I figured, if I learn to be an adult anywhere, I should learn in America. I spoke Japanese like a man in his 30’s, but I still spoke English like a kid just out of college, which was what I was when I first arrived at the monastery gates.

After ten years of being cold all the time, eating whatever was offered, sitting up to 20 hours a day, and sleeping rarely more than four hours at a stretch, my health was suffering. Add to that the stress of living in a foreign culture, speaking a second language, I was accumulating chronic conditions the doctors were telling me would never get better. Something was telling me that if I carried on like this much longer, I would get seriously ill.

Six months later, I’m in Montreal, staying on a friend’s couch. I have $300 in cash, and no idea what I’m supposed to do when that is gone.

I didn’t have a phone, a car, an apartment, or a computer. I still wore my monastery work clothes and sandals. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, in the middle of the Montreal winter, I started trading work for classes in hot yoga studios. For one, the warmth was such an unimaginable luxury. For another thing, I knew that being active in the heat was helping me heal.

It’s been fourteen years since I arrived back in North America. In that time I’ve taught meditation and yoga to hundreds of people. I worked as a counselor, a third-wave coffee barista, and a bartender. I got a masters in education and taught literature. And I have a phone now.

I would never have predicted that teaching meditation and yoga would lead to teaching literature, would lead to copywriting, would lead to founding a web design agency. But life has a way of putting you where you need to be.

When we work with you, we start with a deep dive into your existing brand, your values, your audience. We look at your goals, and help you bridge the gap between here and there. Then we create the visual identity and brand voice that you want for the future of your company.

We pull all the parts together for you. Brand, web design, development and writing all in one place. That way you get one unified vision with all the parts working together in harmony, and you don’t need to hunt around and create your own team.

We find that Squarespace is the right platform for most small and mid sized organizations. Unless you have a web developer on staff, we always recommend going with Squarespace. It is easy to make beautiful looking sites, they are accessible and responsive, the backend is extremely intuitive, and their customer service is excellent.

Our clients get much more than a killer website, they get clarity about the value they bring to the world and how to communicate that to the audience that needs them.