I gave this talk on January 15, 2026. A recording follows the text.

This is Case 27 in The Blue Cliff Record:

A monk asked Yun Men, “How is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall?”

Yun Men said, “Body exposed in the golden wind.”

I had a mysterious dream thirty-five years ago. I didn’t understand it until earlier this week. It’s hung about me all these years like a koan.

I was living in Berlin, Germany. I had traveled south to the Black Forest in Bavaria to attend a retreat with Sogyal Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher. 

One night there I dreamt of an important friend meditating serenely. She and I had been very close years earlier.  I hesitate to add this detail, because it was not an erotic dream, but my friend was not fully dressed. (For the record and for what it’s worth, I had never seen her like this.) Now I understand that both our close friendship and her naturally exposed state in this dream are important details.

A strange word accompanied this image of my friend meditating: Bekommweg. 

That was the whole dream. The image of my friend meditating and this word.

Bekommweg is not a real German word. It’s a mashup of two other words. Bekommen means “to receive.” “Weg” means way and also “away.” “Wegwerfen” means to throw away. This sense of throwing away, or casting away, was how I understood the “weg” in “bekommweg” when I woke from my dream. 

It’s this strange word that has hovered like a koan all these years. What did it mean?

It finally came to me a few days ago. I was ready to receive its meaning.

It means receiving by letting go. Translated literally, bekommweg would be something like receive-away. We also could translate it as the receiving way, or the path of receiving, but receiving by letting go best captures the sense of the message encoded in my dream.

This is the only way we can receive. Receiving by letting go is what our Zen practice and teachings are all about.

This is zazen. We sit openly, receiving everything, holding nothing. We sit intimately, deeply connected to ourselves and all else. We sit completely exposed.

This is non-attachment, which is the only sensible and sustainable orientation to experience in a world of constant change; an existence marked by impermanence. 

Non-attachment is not indifference or distance. It’s total presence. It’s non-separation. It’s meeting everything and everyone as subject, as the center of the universe—a universe of which we also are center. Non-attachment is the antithesis of meeting another as an object to which we conceivably could attach. 

This is the only path of true intimacy in relationship. We can’t genuinely be intimate with someone we objectify. Someone we try to possess or control, however subtly and whether we experience ourselves as needing to control from above or from below. Nor can we genuinely be intimate if we’re trying to be too possessed or in control of ourselves in the relationship; if we’re too bounded. Intimacy requires vulnerability, exposure, relinquishment of control, real peer-to-peer engagement. No above or below. Boundaries, but not impenetrable boundaries through which nothing truly affecting can come or go.

We must let go to experience intimacy, to receive it.

Sometimes what we must let go of is entirely intangible. A belief, a desire, a feeling, or a personal tendency that no longer serves us or others we care about. We must change in place, so to speak. We let go of something inside us to make way for the uncontainable—what’s truly alive, what’s real—rather than the golden calf or piece of shit conjured by our imagination.

Sometimes we must let go of something tangible, maybe even before we have fully let go of our beliefs, desires, or feelings about it. Maybe we must let go of an object we cherished, money we’ve lost, an opportunity, a role, a loved one who has passed, a child who has left the nest or should, a relationship. 

We must learn to let go of both the tangible and the intangible. Letting go means truly letting go. Accepting what comes. Even if it’s a parting. 

Life is a continuous parting. Letting go of what was to make way for what’s actually here or what’s arriving. The only way truly to be here, receiving all life has to offer, is to reconcile ourselves to letting go. 

It’s the only way to be intimate with life.

Time passes swiftly, even when we wish it didn’t. Imagine if we could grab onto time as it’s passing, like grabbing a rope being dragged over the ground by a wild horse on the run. We latch onto the rope at some moment in time to try to obtain or freeze-frame some state or situation we favor, and then we find ourselves being dragged across the ground, in agony but holding on for dear life, afraid to let go. 

Holding onto experience is impossible. We only make ourselves and others miserable if we try to contain or control the uncontainable. If we try to make anything or anyone conform to our self-serving, idealized notion of it or them. 

The tree withers. It doesn’t resist its withering. It lets go of its leaves. Releases them to the golden wind that’s bending its branches and peeling its bark. 

This all may sound a bit stoic, but we simply can’t receive by holding on. We can’t receive if our hands are full or clenched into fists.

We can’t receive if we won’t let go of our complaints, grudges, and fixed views about others. If we keep them imprisoned on the other side of a stone wall as they grow and change beyond the barriers we erect, which limit our field of vision. We might need to change ourselves. We must at least step out from behind our wall; be present to perceive and receive them. 

Our bodies are forever changing, circumstances are changing, those around us are changing, our relationships with others are changing. We can’t hold onto what was, nor what never was that we have imagined or wished for. We can only ever welcome what is and what’s to come.

Whatever may come, we must let go to receive it.

I’ll close by rereading the poem “Lucky” by the Buddhist nun Bhadra that we chanted during our liturgy:

You always considered yourself lucky 

because things seemed to work out

the way you wanted. 

Now luck has a different meaning.

Lucky to be walking a Path that finds peace—in the arising and passing

away of each present moment.

Regardless of how things work out—

or don’t.