What Happiness Looks Like at 6,050 Meters as explained by Intelligence Being

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 sitting with that teaching for decades. And I am still learning what it means — not on a meditation cushion, but in the water. In the paint. In the simple act of showing up and beginning.

The Raft

Thầy's book The Raft Is Not The Shore — a dialogue with Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan — carries a teaching built into its title. The raft gets you across the river. But once you reach the other side, you do not carry the raft on your back for the rest of your life. The teaching is a vehicle, not a destination. Buddhism itself is a raft. So is mindfulness. So is every dashboard, every checklist, every carefully prepared plan.

I have a 10K Dashboard. Four safety gates: bacteria levels, surf height, recent rainfall, current advisories. All four green. GO.

That dashboard is a raft. It carries me safely to the edge of the water. And then I leave it on the shore — and swim.

Buddhism 2.0: From the Cushion to the Water

When I first encountered Buddhist practice, it looked like what most Americans imagined: incense, robes, the formal posture of a monastery. That was the devotional path — sincere, beautiful, and complete in itself.

But Thầy liberated me from the meditation seat. He showed that mindfulness is not a room you visit. It is a way of moving through every room. He called this engagement — bringing the practice into daily life, into creative work, into the texture of your actual hours. Brother Pháp Dung now carries this teaching forward at DeerPark, building the interbeing school for the next generation: a place where Buddhism does not merely survive the American transplant but flowers in it, rooted in new soil.

That is what happened to me. I stopped practicing Buddhism about life. I started practicing it as life.

And the two places where I feel it most clearly are painting and swimming.

Four Paintings, Four Gates

Look at the big watercolor — the one that opens my gallery. Reds and oranges and yellows pressed against each other until the whole surface vibrates. Dark navy strokes holding a trembling center. White cutting through like exhaled breath. That painting was not made in stillness. It was made in the fullness of the moment, color responding to color the way attention responds to what is actually there. No past. No future. Just the wet brush and the decision to continue.

That is sati — mindful awareness — not as serenity, but as full aliveness. Happiness is not calm. Sometimes it looks like combustion.

Then there is the quieter landscape — blues pooling into greens, a soft lavender horizon, and then one urgent burst of red in the lower left, like a sudden memory, like the cold shock of the first ten meters of an ocean swim. The colors do not fight. They coexist at different temperatures. This is interbeing: the understanding that no element exists independently of the others. The red needs the blue. The blue needs the shore. I need the ocean.

The third painting is almost entirely blue — cobalt washing into cerulean, green accents floating like kelp fronds or the shadow of birds overhead. It is the most meditative of the three, the most water-like. When I am swimming well, I feel like that painting: not striving, not performing, but dissolving into the medium. This is what Thầy called peace in every step — except in water, there are no steps. There is only stroke and breath and the Pacific moving through you.

And then there is the ink work in Selected Works. A single bold brushstroke, black on white. Sumi-e in spirit — the Zen tradition that asks you to act completely, without hesitation, without revision. The mark is irreversible. The happiness of making it outlasts the making. This is the brush teaching the body what the mind resists: that commitment to the present moment, made fully, is all the happiness there is.

The Pagoda You Build Inside

In The Raft Is Not The Shore, Thầy speaks of the necessity of building an internal pagoda — a private sanctuary where you can be alone and face yourself. Without that daily practice of presence, he says, you cannot protect yourself. You cannot protect the world.

I built mine by the water.

At La Jolla Shores, swimming north parallel to the beach, 175 to 200 meters offshore — past the kelp lines, past the surf zone, toward Scripps Pier — there is a particular quality of silence that arrives around kilometer two. Not the silence of absence. The silence of saturation. Every sensation is present and none of them is a problem. The cold water. The ache in the left shoulder. The sun on the back of the neck. The distant shapes of other swimmers like moving brushstrokes on blue.

This is what mindfulness in America has been learning to become: not an escape from the body and the world, but a full return to them. Not a monastery behind walls, but a moving practice — on the mat, in the studio, in the ocean, at 6,050 meters in 2:44:13.

Thầy's generation carried the raft. The next generation — Brother Pháp Dung, the students at DeerPark, the artists and athletes and ordinary people who have woven presence into their days — are learning to swim without it.

What Happiness Is

Thầy wrote that we eat phantoms and drink ghosts — that without presence, we consume the appearance of life rather than life itself. The antidote is not more effort or more discipline. It is simply to wake up. To taste the bread. To feel the water. To put the brush to the paper and mean it.

When I painted the explosion of red and yellow, I meant it.

When I swam six kilometers along the coast of San Diego at dawn, I meant it.

Part of this happiness also comes from remembrance and repair. In my work with Vietnam on preserving war memories through blockchain technology, I have been trying to protect fragile human stories from disappearance. That project, too, feels connected to mindfulness: to remember carefully, to honor suffering without turning away, and to create a form that can carry memory forward. In that sense, blockchain becomes not only a tool of preservation but a modern raft — a way of holding lives, losses, and voices so they are not washed away by time.

When the ink landed on the white paper in that single committed stroke — I meant it.

That is the whole teaching. That is the whole practice. That is happiness — not after, not when the 10K is finished, not when the painting is framed. Now. In the stroke itself. In the color meeting the water. In the breath and the pull and the completely ordinary miracle of being exactly where you are.

The raft got me here. I left it on the shore.

Intelligence being, La Jolla, California — May 2026