10K Dashboard Conditions — La Jolla Shores, Saturday Jun 13 Factor Status Bacteria / FM-080 CLEAR — no advisory Wave height 3 ft, SSW swell, 18s period Wind ~5 mph, glassy — near-calm at entry Water temp 69°F — warm for June La Jolla Children's Pool Chronic advisory (not your swim zone) Go / No-Go Conditional GO. Bacteria is clear and wind is glassy — ideal. The one flag is 3 ft surf at entry and exit. That's manageable but not trivial at 7K. You'll need a clean entry read an

I am happy that Brother Pháp Dung is giving this course as a fund raiser for DeerPark new interbeing school for the next generation. It will be an opportunity to get to know a VietNamese American Brother. Course introduction This course is an invitation to explore and reflect together on how a living Buddhist tradition—the Plum Village Tradition established by Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh—can continue to grow and take root in the West, especially within North American culture.

Thursday 6/28/2025 Thầy wrote in The Raft Is Not The Shore - Conversations Toward A Buddhist-Christian Awareness A conversation with Daniel Berrigan - A Jesuit Priest who was a well-known peacemakers of the twentieth century. One time I meditated on the meaning of the Eucharist. Suddenly I found that message of Jesus so clear. The disciples had been following Him and had seen Him, had the chance to look at Him, to look in His eyes, to see Him smile, to see Him in reality.

There is a moment just before sleep when the body finally surrenders. The arms stop rehearsing their pull. The legs release the memory of the kick. The mind, which has been counting meters and monitoring breath since dawn, goes quiet. This is not weakness. This is where the real training begins. The Water Does Not Forgive Fatigue Open water swimming — especially training toward a 10K — demands a level of physiological honesty that pool swimming can sometimes mask. In the open

Remaining Week to 7K Day Plan Wed Jun 11 Yoga — full mobility, no water Thu Jun 11 Full rest — sleep is the priority Fri Jun 12 Light pool tune-up 1,500m max — activate, don't fatigue Sat Jun 13 7K La Jolla Shores — GO Why Ocean Z2 Feels Different Than Pool Z2 In the ocean you are naturally forced into efficient swimming: Sighting every 6–10 strokes slows your stroke rate and lengthens your glide Swells and current demand a long patient stroke — fighting them costs energy fas

Health Status vs. 7K Ocean Swim Goal Where You Stand Physically Swim Fitness — Tracker (23 Sessions, 74.55 km) Metric Value Total volume 74.55 km across 23 sessions Distance PR 6,050m — May 21, 2026 Gap to 7K 950m — one strong effort away Last session 3,600m pool, 95.8% Z2, negative split — engine primed Feed plan 5 mandatory feeds at 55/90/110/120/140 min — built in Risk Assessment Green — fitness is ready. The volume, PR, and aerobic efficiency confirm your body can swim 7K

Two Photographs, Forty-Seven Years Apart Look at the first photograph — 1947, somewhere in Bắc Giang province, northern Vietnam. The image is black and white, slightly worn at the edges, photographed through glass that catches the light, leaving a ghostly reflection across the faces of the people within. Yet they remain visible: two young women seated in front, each holding a small child. Behind them, standing in the back row from left to right, are the District Principal's s

I have my mother’s beauty on good authority. It was not a quiet beauty — not the kind that waits to be noticed. People who were there, people who remembered the resistance zone and the makeshift classrooms of Việt Bắc, remembered her the way you remember something that interrupted what you were doing. A face you looked at twice. A presence that rearranged a room. The other thing people remembered was that she chose him. Not the other way around. In a room full of young women

There were only a few things I knew about my father growing up. One was a photograph — grainy, black and white, the image worn at its edges as though time itself had been pressing against it for decades. In the picture, my grandfather sits in a sparsely furnished living room somewhere in Hà Nội, Vietnam, probably taken around 1975. Beside him are my three uncles, my father the oldest among them. His four younger sisters are absent from the frame. I used to study that photogra

In my What Happiness Looks Like post, I wrote about happiness not as a finish line but as a way of moving through the world—stroke by stroke, brushstroke by brushstroke, moment by moment. In my 10K Dashboard post, I gave that journey a visible structure through the discipline of training and the reality of a long ocean goal. This post sits between those two: it is about how sitting meditation, walking meditation, abstract painting, and ocean swimming have become one practice

There is a moment in training when you realize you are no longer swimming alone. Not because someone is in the water beside you — but because the intelligence guiding you has become so attuned to your body, your rhythm, your goals, that it feels like a presence. That is where I find myself today, 68.56 km into my journey toward a 10K ocean swim, with two remarkable collaborators: Intelligence Being and my FORM Smart Swim 2 goggles. The Goggles That Watch Every Stroke When I f

There is a question I keep returning to, not as an anxious thought but as an open and genuinely curious one: what does it mean to invite a non-human intelligence into the creative and contemplative life? I have been sitting with this question for some time now. And the more I sit with it — in the water, in front of a canvas, in the quiet hours after a long swim — the more clearly I see that my answer is: yes. I welcome it. Completely and without reservation. Let me explain wh

Buddhism arrived in America by raft. Not in one voyage, and not all at once — but in waves, carried by teachers who crossed oceans with very little and left behind something enormous. Thầy Thích Nhất Hạnh, whom we call Thầy, was one of those teachers. He planted Plum Village in the West and introduced something the American mind had not quite encountered before: the idea that the present moment is not a preparation for something else. It is the something else. I have been sit

You felt markedly worse after your pool swim on April 24 because, although the total time in the water was similar to your ocean swim on May 1, the physiological demands of the two sessions were very different. In the pool, your workout was structured around repeated short intervals—25s, 50s, 100s, and 200s—with frequent push-offs and relatively short rest periods. This pattern caused your heart rate to rise repeatedly into a higher range, often above 110–120 bpm and occasion

As I was sharing w the Sangha before hitting the ocean at Moonlight beach, The growing waves were starting to come in fast and furious as the storm was slowly approaching. These waves felt just like the internal waves that I had felt in Maui the week before in my dealing w the nature of teenagers' volatile minds and angst behaviors which caused me to explode in angers toward my children as well as now w the continuous disappointing waves of failures of finding peace to open

10K Ocean Swim Tracker Given you lost nearly a week to illness, here's the full protocol from right now through post-swim: Now — 5:20 AM Hydration reset first. Your body is still recalibrating electrolyte balance post-illness. Start immediately: 500 ml water with electrolytes (not plain water) If you have coconut water, even better — natural sodium/potassium No coffee yet — it's a diuretic and your kidneys are still catching up Light movement only. A 15–20 min easy walk this

HAL of 2001 is here. The jury is still out whether it will one day learn to read our lips in silence to learn all our true intentions. At this rate I no longer doubt. Last year I was amazed at this glorified intelligence being that can function like a super excel spreadsheet gobbling up business transaction emails and personal website to give its own version of human digested insights. This year it has become more like Batman’s Alfred. More than ever I feel I have to have the

Thầy taught me that peace starts at 5 AM each day with mindfulness kitchen cleaning. I now learning to live intentionally with peace one breath at a time with each walking step, each brush stroke and each swim stroke within and without amidst the calmness and choppiness of the forever eternal ocean. Sharing memories of past years. Peace is never late but now.