Hello,

I’m writing from New England, sitting next to the woods, against a sonic backdrop of birds, insects, and other creatures sounding in contrapuntal, twittering anticipation for the sunny day to come. It’s quite a performance.

Over the past year, I have been making an intentional transition from arts leadership into a career built around healing. For me, that meant stepping away from an organization I had led for a decade, developing a deeper relationship to nature through a new home outside of the city, and gaining certification in classical homeopathy then launching my own online clinical practice. This has been a profoundly healing shift and I encourage others to try some version!

As the final element in this shift, I am happy to share that, starting tomorrow, I will be the Executive Director of the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care. I'm joining a community that trains caregivers in introducing Zen Buddhist principles in caring for people in illness, grief, and dying with unreserved presence. This role deeply integrates so many aspects of my personal beliefs, career experience, and history. Zen practice has been part of my life since I was a teenager, and to have this opportunity to build a strong structure, a container, to protect and fortify this work is a gift I am deeply grateful for.  

Last year, I wrote about someone who fueled my interest in contemplative care: Issan Dorsey, founder of the first Buddhist AIDS hospice in San Francisco, at the height of the crisis. Coincidentally, or synchronistically depending on your woo investment, that biography of Issan Dorsey contained a foreword written by one of the co-founders of the center, who I will now be working alongside. In fact, the NY Zen Center publicly references Dorsey as being key to their conception of the training programs. Sometimes the cosmos pulls us to the exact spot we are meant to be.

Some of you may wonder what this means for my homeopathy practice. Nothing is changing, it was built small on purpose, so I will continue to work with the clients I have and, should openings arise, occasionally take on new ones while keeping the clinic intentionally limited. The scheduling may shift but the quality won’t.

Fifty is coming for me at the end of the summer. It feels right that this new decade opens this way. If I have learned anything through my work as a young sound artist, composer, then curator and teacher, arts non-profit leader, now homeopath, and urban temple director, it is that imagination, intuition, and creativity thrive in a well-nourished mind and body. This is related to the idea that creative responses to one’s environment are a signal of a healthy vitality, even if that response might feel uncomfortable, like a fever fighting a virus (on the level of the body) or removing yourself from damaging relationships (on the level of the mind). It is when one is not able to creatively respond to their surroundings that we see illness.

Thank you for reading, for the encouragement, and for following a path that often refuses to follow a straight line.

Until next time,

Roddy