I gave this talk at our Full Moon Zen sesshin on April 18, 2026. A recording follows the text.

Here is the prose poem “This Moment is the Koan,” by Keizan Jokin:

Although we speak of practice, this is not a practice you can do.

Don’t try to fabricate Buddha; and don’t be concerned with how well or how poorly you think you’re doing.

Just understand that time is as precious as if you were putting out a fire in your hair.

Shatter obstacles and become intimate with awakening awareness. Arising from stillness, carry out activities without hesitation.

This moment is the koan. When practice and realization are without complexity, the koan is this present moment. 

That which is before any trace arises and the scenery on the other side of time’s destruction, the activity of all Buddhas and awakened Ancestors, is just this one thing. 

Just rest and cease; be cooled; pass numberless years as this moment. This is like coming home and sitting at ease.

“Tap your heels together three times and repeat, ‘There’s no place like home,’” Glinda the Good Witch tells Dorothy near the end of The Wizard of Oz. This incantation transports Dorothy back to the family farm in Kansas. Home had become a strange and dangerous place for her in late adolescence—but nowhere near as strange and dangerous, and ultimately wonder-filled and transformative, as the journey that began when she left.

Dorothy needs to escape home as the story begins. As it ends, she has a different perspective on home. Now she knows home is where her heart is, and she longs to return.

I think The Wizard of Oz is an underappreciated spiritual classic—perhaps not quite up there with Dōgen’s teachings, but close. 🙂

Dorothy doesn’t feel quite at home in her life, and then discovers her life as home. The scarecrow can’t think straight and then finds clarity. The tin man feels heartless and discovers love and compassion. The lion feels timid—separated from his nature—and regains his courage.

Ignorance and delusions replaced by clarity and wisdom. Heartlessness transformed into big, open-hearted love and compassion. Fear of life transformed into courage to meet it. Separateness transformed into connection. Restless, anxious wandering resolved into a sense of place wherever we are.

Well, that’s a pretty good summation of the arc of long practice; the arc of our journey. We arrive with a sense of lack and separation and discover wholeness. We come home.

Keizan offers a Zen coda to this story. He reframes it in the language and spirit of Zen. 

We only imagine we are wandering from home when we take up practice, he says. In reality, we can’t leave home. 

There is no ultimate doing well because there is no ultimate doing poorly. There is no ultimate difference between realization and practice. There is no becoming more Buddha than we are right now.

No homecoming because there is no going away. No departure; no return.

Just this. This precious moment. This moment is home.

What is home as this moment?

The word and idea of home likely evokes something different for each of us, depending upon our past and present experience. For some, home signals safety, warmth, comfort, contentment. For others, less so, or maybe not at all.

Keizan is pointing to a deeper meaning of home that is sensory but not sentimental. Home as a sense of intimacy, comfort, and ease wherever we are. Being home in this vast universe. Being home in our own skin. Not separating from this skin-bag here and now, as Shitou encourages us not to do—as if we could.

Whatever our associations with home life may have been as a child, and whatever they are as an adult, the message and gift of Zen is that we can discover a sense of okayness and ease here and now, in this moment. A sense of home amid whatever arises. A sense of home that isn’t dependent on our outward circumstances. A sense of home that abides. Abiding abode. Home that emerges continually.

Home-leaving is a huge theme in Buddhism historically, and it still is today in other parts of the world. It’s not just a metaphor. For millennia, people have been leaving their families, shaving their heads, and entering monasteries. For millennia, and still today in most forms of Buddhism, in most parts of the world, living as a monk is considered the most authentic, elevated form of spiritual life. The word “sangha” is reserved for the community of monastics in most corners of the Buddhist world.

Fortunately, those ideas are beginning to be contested and to dissolve, especially here in the West. Monastic life can be beautiful for those who are called to it. We should be grateful for the teachings and forms that evolved from monastic life, which are available to us householders as inspiration and potential raw material for use in our lives.

And we need more people to discover home at home, so to speak. Our families, workplaces, local communities, and nations need to come home at home. We home-stayers must claim and develop our own contemplative birthright and ways of life that honor and fully express it.

I’m not advocating for more corporate and school-based McMindfulness programs. I’m talking about reshaping and recentering our lives to realize—to experience and manifest—at-one-ment moment to moment.

Meditation is a one of our key practices, but there are others—our liturgy, bowing and chanting, study of the sutras, koan work, how we eat, work, and play, the Precepts, our many forms—all of it. And the spirit and practice of meticulousness we bring to it all. Reverence, which is to say loving attention. Loving attending. The practice and experience of presence. Pure presence.

Meditation, the core practice for which Zen is known and after which it is named, is not about efficiency gains on the job or even self-help. Our self gets the help it most needs when it discovers itself at home—by which I mean not separate from—this vast robe of liberation that is, quite literally, everything. All us. No one and nothing separate.

We know we’re home when that realization and experience overcomes us; when it becomes familiar. Steady. Trustable. Ordinary. 

That is the ripest fruit of our practice. And it might just help us fall toward and find our ground in and as relationship, in and as our work, in our homes and the other places we inhabit. And sweeten our experiences there.

So bow three times and repeat, “There’s no place like home.” Know you’re already here, always have been, and always will be, in the bowing and repeating.

Here in this moment. In and as the scenery that has arisen, fleetingly, on this side of time’s destruction. 

Home.