Who Keeps This Journal
I was born in Kanowit, a small town on a river in Sarawak, East Malaysia, and grew up speaking Foochow. At seventeen I entered an enclosed Carmelite monastery to keep a promise I had made to God and almost managed to forget. I stayed eleven years.
It was there, at twenty-one, in a dark oratory, that I asked whether the grace I was being given was real, and heard with my inner ears: Not yet but I will. That promise has been kept — slowly, strangely, across fifty years, through Taoism and Buddhism, the Indian mystics, Kriya Yoga, the physicists and philosophers, and finally past all of them, into the quiet itself.
I am in my seventies now and live in Arizona with two dogs. The writing here is not composed; it arrives, usually before dawn, and I set it down without correcting it. The grammar limps sometimes. I have learned not to fix the limp — that is where the transmission is.
I am no one’s teacher. If anything on these pages is true, you will recognize it yourself, from the same land it came from — the one that is white and bright, and inside you already.
The Quiet Land 