While this one began as a step toward stillness, it came to life through the love, insight, and generosity of so many others. From gentle encouragement to dedicated edits, from holding space to holding the kids — this journey was never mine alone to carry.

Thank you to all who helped Light find its way into the world.

With gratitude I remember the people, animals, plants, insects, creatures of the sky and sea, air and water, fire and earth, all whose joyful exertion blesses my life every day.
With gratitude I remember the care and labor of a thousand generations of elders and ancestors who came before me.
I offer my gratitude for the safety and well-being I have been given.
I offer my gratitude for the blessing of this earth I have been given.
I offer my gratitude for the measure of health I have been given.
I offer my gratitude for the family and friends I have been given.
I offer my gratitude for the community I have been given.
I offer my gratitude for the teachings and lessons I have been given.
I offer my gratitude for the life I have been given.

— Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart

Acknowledgments

This book began as a step toward stillness and silence, but it was brought into being by so many voices.

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This epilogue is not a story of triumph. It’s a return. To the noise, to doubt, to snack-time chaos, and to the practice of beginning again.

Writing this wasn’t easy. It was full of doubts and false starts. But the process, like meditation, became its own kind of path. I don’t know where it leads. But I’m still walking.

Thank you for joining me on this journey.

It’s called the fire that really burns. It’s the fire of the marketplace. See, it’s really easy to go off to a cave and get high, and you know, stay so high and beautiful by denying all that. But when you stay right in it. Right in the marketplace and work with it, and look people in the eye. And deal with poverty. And deal with greed, and lust, and anger, and impurities, and politicians, and paranoia, and all that stuff. And say, “yes, yes, yes, I see it all. Alright, I understand it all. I’ve got to play my part in it, and do it purely and with love.” That’s the work! That’s the fiercest work. It’s the fiercest fire we can stand in.

— Ram Dass, Hear and Now Podcast, Episode 13

The Weeks and Months After

Once I returned home, I was a fully realized being – completely enlightened, free from all worldly attachments, radiating serenity in every moment.

The end.

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Truth, tears, and rain. A poetic end to five days into stillness.

Day 5: Kataññutā

(Gratitude)

It’s Always Both!

As I continued to sit, retreatants slowly began arriving for the final closing session. The room filled with soft movements. The light rustling of cushions, the gentle settling of bodies.

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This chapter opens with a question about worry and ends with a deeper realization.

Day 5: Kataññutā

(Gratitude)

Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.

— A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

Confidence

I woke to a different kind of light. It filtered into the room more diffuse than the day before. I glimpsed the sky outside through the window. It was stretched in dark, muted grays. The air in the room also felt different somehow. I could tell that the day carried a different kind of humidity.

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But the deeper lesson lands in the tension itself: to practice isn’t to avoid discomfort, but to hold joy and fear, compassion and clinging – together.

Day 4: Forgetting; Remembering

(Exploring)

Muditā

The afternoon’s Dharma talk was about joy. Not just any joy – muditā. Sympathetic joy. The kind of happiness that comes not from personal gain but from witnessing someone else’s.

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This entry explores the tension between belonging and detachment, grasping and grace, and the revelations that emerge when we stop trying to make sense of everything, and instead… just notice.

Day 4: Forgetting; Remembering

(Exploring)

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.

— Anne Dudley Bradstreet, Meditations Divine and Moral

Reflecting

Each morning felt more natural. I awoke before the bells that stirred the rest of the retreat. The steps to the meditation hall felt familiar, unhurried. There was nothing to resist. The silent sit was steady. Breath, sensation, stillness. No need to grasp at anything. The lesson on the second arrow had landed, and I felt an ease with letting things be as they were. Or so I thought.

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It’s about subtle choices, unseen reactions, and the small movements that shape our suffering.

I started to wonder: what if the thing I want most isn’t relief or resolution, but the courage to let go?

Day 3: Symphony in Silence

(Listening)

The Valence of Experience

The light outside had begun its slow fade into dusk, as I wandered into the meditation hall for another sitting. Even inside the hall, with its high wooden ceiling and wide windows, the shifting glow of evening began to cast long shadows. The air was still, carrying the weight of the day’s practice.

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What began as attention to sound turns inward…

Into the body, into discomfort, and then into deeper questions: Can we stay open even when we think we’ve found the answer? Can we keep listening, even then?

Day 3: Symphony in Silence

(Listening)

Compassion and Listening to the Body

The day moved on. The weather improved. It was warm now as we started the afternoon meditation. The hall was quiet, the afternoon light filtering in through the windows. Lunch had settled and so had the energy in the room. There was a softness in the air, a gentle lull that made it easier to exhale.

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By now, silence had become familiar. But listening… fully listening… that was strangely something new.

This section explores the sounds behind the stillness, and the curious truth that what we hear might not exist without us.

Day 3: Symphony in Silence

(Listening)

Listen, and feel the beauty of your separation, the unsayable absence.
There's a moon inside every human being.
Learn to be companions with it.
Give more of your life to this listening.
As brightness is to time, so you are to the one
who talks to the deep ear in your chest.
I should sell my tongue and buy a thousand ears
when that one steps near and begins to speak.

— Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, Listening

4’33”

The morning air was cool but softer than the days before. No frost, just the crisp stillness of early light stretching over the retreat grounds. A small but certain shift in the weather.

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Day 2: Just As It Is

(Being)

Faith?

The evening Dharma talk began.

"Faith,” the teacher said, letting the word hang in the air.

My shoulders tensed almost immediately.

You know that grating, squeaking sound of polystyrene rubbing against itself? And that instantaneous resistance? Yeah… that’s what I feel when I hear the word “faith” – something like immediate irritation. What is it with that word that evokes so much emotion in me?

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This section is about the constant questioning, and the unexpected ways our intentions still tangle with ego – even when we think we’ve “learned the lesson.”

Day 2: Just As It Is

(Being)

Sitting with, ‘How?’

The morning instruction began as it always did – quiet shuffling into the meditation hall, retreatants settling onto their cushions, the faint creak as people adjusted their seats. A moment of stillness. A collective inhale and exhale.

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The morning brought stillness. It felt like peace without condition. And yet even here, a deeper question stirred: Can peace itself turn into suffering when we attempt to cling to it?

And then a reminder… that we don’t have to take everything so seriously. And joy doesn’t need a reason.

Day 2: Just As It Is

(Being)

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

— Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person

The Frost-Covered Path

I rolled over onto my back. The sheets pressed lightly against me as I stirred. I slowly opened my eyes. It was still quite dark in my room, except for the faint glow of red-light coming from the digital alarm clock. I wondered what time it was. Before I looked, I noticed how refreshed I felt, how well I slept. This was unusual for me. I lay there for a little while, feeling the stillness and quiet of the room. I glanced at the clock: 4:49am. How exquisite! I hadn’t set an alarm the night before, wondering what time I might wake up naturally.

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Sometimes, insight doesn’t arrive as clarity. Sometimes it comes as permission.

Day 1: Wanting to be Wanted

(Striving)

Working Meditation

A short time after lunch, I joined the second shift for dishes in the back kitchen, checking in for my first work meditation.

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Letting go doesn’t always feel graceful. But sometimes, even a misstep becomes part of the practice.

Day 1: Wanting to be Wanted

(Striving)

Relinquishing

I moved quickly down the final stretch of the trail, my breath still unsteady from running, my mind lingering on the irony of the missed turn. I had slowed my pace slightly, but my body still held the charge of movement. Even as I reached the clearing near the meditation hall, I could feel my pulse in my throat, the lingering heat in my legs.

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What follows is a walk, a wave of emotion, a missed turn, and an unexpected teaching. Sometimes the path reveals itself only after we lose it.

Day 1: Wanting to be Wanted

(Striving)

The Great Loop

As I slowly walked up the same path from the day before and passed the wooden platform, I remembered the emotions that had flooded through me in this very spot. The weight of the morning’s realization had left something unfinished. Just past the platform was a trail sign. The sign read “Great Loop Trail.”

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This section is about noticing what that first full day felt like. The quiet. The doubt. The laughter. And the surprising realization that surfaced before breakfast.

Day 1: Wanting to be Wanted

(Striving)

When nothing is done, nothing is left undone. The world is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be ruled by interfering.

— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, chapter 48

Waking Into Longing

The alarm startled me, even though I had been waiting for it.

5:15 AM.

I was grateful I had set it the night before, though I had woken up multiple times throughout the night to check the glowing red numbers on the small bedside alarm. Each time I stirred, I half-expected to hear my children down the hall, the hum of the air purifier, the subtle creaks of my home. But there was only stillness. A very different kind of quiet.

And now, here it was – the first morning where silence was no longer just an idea, but a reality.

I lay there for a moment, feeling the unfamiliarity of it. I was excited, but there was something else underneath. Apprehension. A lingering sense of stepping into the unknown.

That was the thing about the unknown – I had always seen it as a temporary state, something waiting to be solved. It existed only to be conquered, understood, turned into the known. The entire reason for the unknown’s existence was for it to eventually become known. That was just how I’d always thought about it.

But my coach had challenged me on this recently.

Okay, I should actually back up here and explain what I mean by “coach.” Every now and then in conversation, I might mention something I talked about with my “coach,” and almost without fail, I get the look. Head tilt. Curious pause. Sometimes a skeptical squint. “Wait… you have a coach?” I’ve gotten used to it. I don’t play a sport. I’m not training for a marathon. So the word tends to throw people off. For a while, I tried to clarify: life coach? career coach? therapist-in-disguise? But eventually I stopped. “Coach” is still the best word I’ve found. The rest can stay a little mysterious.

Now, back to the story...

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This second installment of Day 0 captures a deeper moment. One of those rare instances where insight doesn’t arrive as a thought, but as a feeling. A glimpse of something that reshapes how I saw the world, even if only for a moment.

This was the first real crack in the surface.

Day 0: Knowing Oneness; Sensing Separateness

(Remembering, Continued)

What a Beautiful Illusion

The gentle light of afternoon had softened into something more diffuse, the air cool but not cold. I walked up the hillside path, past the creek, following the sound of its murmuring.

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Even amidst those ordinary transitions, something was already beginning to shift. In Part 2 of Day 0 (coming soon), I’ll share what unfolded just a few hours later.

Let’s just say: the profundity arrived early.

Day 0: Knowing Oneness; Sensing Separateness

(Remembering)

Illusion is as good a path to reality as any other. Illusions are merciful in that both the illusion and the person who held the illusion disappear, like magic, as soon as we see through them. Illusions show us the ultimate kindness by granting us new freedoms in the very act of their disappearance.

― David Whyte, Consolations II

Arrival

“Welcome!”

The parking lot attendant greeted my Lyft driver as we pulled into the retreat center.

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This is the prologue to Light: A 5-Day Memoir Into Stillness, and it includes a poem that Falling Into Place readers may recognize. I first shared it in one of the earliest posts on that newsletter: Forgetting, Remembering, and Belonging.

What you may not know is that the poem was written months before the vipassanā retreat described in this book. In fact, it was written long before this project, or any of my newsletters, existed.

And yet, it remains one of my favorite pieces. Something in it still feels alive. It captured a shift I didn’t fully understand at the time, but one I’ve come to see as the beginning of a profound unraveling. This silent retreat would deepen that unraveling, but this poem marked the first real crack in the illusion of separateness I had long lived inside.

This special installment of Light is free to all subscribers. I’m grateful to share it again here, with a bit more context, and to welcome those reading it for the first time.

More soon,
Glenn

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Prologue

Dualism: Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life. “I” affirms a separate and abiding me-substance; “am” denies the fact that all existence is relationship and change. “I am.” Two tiny words, but what an enormity of untruth!

— Aldous Huxley, Island

In the months leading up to the retreat described in this book, something subtle but important began to shift for me. I had long been curious about non-duality, and I explored the concept through reading, reflecting, and asking questions. But it always felt conceptual. Distant.

For those new to the topic, non-duality is the idea that separation is an illusion. Beneath the appearance of individual things composed of self (or subject) and other (or object), there is only one seamless reality, undivided and whole. It’s not exactly a theory. It's more like a shift in perception. To paraphrase something Alan Watts might say: it's the realization that you are not a separate observer of the universe; you are the universe, experiencing itself through a particular point of view.

While I could understand the philosophy, I couldn’t feel it directly. Not in any real or sustained way.

Then one day, something broke open.

I wasn’t seeking it. I wasn’t even sitting in meditation. But after a series of profound moments (some inner, some outer), I had the strange and disorienting sense that the boundary between “me” and everything else had suddenly vanished. It wasn’t “enlightenment” or “bliss.” It was more like a gentle unburdening. A soft rupture in the story of separateness I’d been carrying for all of my adult life.

The next day, I sat alone and wrote the poem that follows. It came quickly, fluidly. Not as something I created, but as something I caught. Like water moving through stone, it didn’t need shaping, only space to flow.

Since then, I’ve made a few adjustments to the language of the poem to reflect what I now understand more clearly. But I’ve done my best to keep the core of it intact to what originally arrived: the tone, the clarity, the strangeness of that moment.

I don’t share this poem to convince you of anything. Non-duality is not a perspective that I think everyone needs to arrive at. This is simply where I found myself in the months before my vipassanā retreat. I was still living inside the felt experience of separation, but now with an undercurrent of knowing that what I perceived as separate was beginning to look more like illusion. I was still processing it. Still wondering what it meant.

This retreat became a continuation of that unfolding.

This poem was the beginning of that sense of belonging.

Belonging

This body – this collection of particles, bound for a moment in a fleeting pattern we call “I.”

An illusion.

A necessary one, granting a sense of self, of purpose, of meaning, of longing, of love, of fear. But these are echoes. Constructs of the mind. Ripples on the surface of an ocean that was never divided.

Shakespeare knew: nothing is good or bad until thinking makes it so.

Every particle, every form, strives to exist. Pain is a murmur, a whisper pulling us to attention, a signal that we are stuck. In its absence, relief. A path forward.

Forward toward what? Toward where?

That is the cosmic joke of it all.

There is no destination. Only the desire to be.

Everything is falling, colliding, forming, reforming. Bonds and reactions, reactions and bonds. Patterns of particles entangled in a dance so intricate we imagine ourselves separate.

You. Me. Us. Them. That thing over there.

We forget.

We forget that nothing is separate. That everything is connected to everything else.

Our pain, our joy, our hunger, our insight — is one movement, one breath, one shifting flow of existence. We mistake this brief assembly of cells, molecules, atoms, and muons for a self.

But it is only this — now.

And this, too, will change.

Some bonds weave even more complex forms — patterns of new life. New beings. Each perceiving themselves as separate, believing they have emerged from nothing. From something beyond them. Beyond comprehension.

They, too, will carry the illusion of separation.

Until they transform again.

This life — this transient flicker of perception — is a construct built by the temporary belief in individuality. It makes space for contrast, for the experience of “other.”

And yet, believing ourselves apart, we strive to connect.

We create. Houses, schools, books, business, currency, justice, right, wrong. We search for meaning. All in an effort to connect the already connected.

But what does this mean — here, now, in this moment?

It means that everything we do shapes everything that is.

It means there is no “other.” 
That every “other” is us.

When we create pain, we create it in ourselves. When we create joy, it radiates through the whole. Because the whole is all there is.

So let this temporary pattern of particles — this “I” we each inhabit — flow in a way that brings beauty into form. Let it be witnessed, shared, and reflected. And in turn, witness the beauty that emerges all around you.

For existence reveals itself through experience.

Notice it.

Pay attention.

Beauty is everywhere.

Without a witness, a thing merely is.

And yet, to notice — to marvel, to stand in awe — is to bring it into being.

To appreciate is to create.

To see beauty is to make it so.

This does not mean you must see beauty in all things.

You do not need to appreciate everything.

In fact, you do not need to do anything at all.

But when you sense even the faintest glimmer of appreciation, pause — recognizing its fleeting impermanence.

Bask in the gift of its presence.

And in that moment…

Remember your belonging.

Welcome. This is the first installment of Light: A 5-Day Memoir Into Stillness, shared here as a serial release on LightInStillness.com.

You can read more about the project on my About page, but here’s the short version: this is my first book, and I’m releasing it piece by piece as I revise and shape it. This story comes from a five-day silent meditation retreat I attended at the start of 2025, and while much of it is personal, I hope it speaks to something beyond my own experience.

If you’ve ever wondered what a silent retreat might reveal, I hope this offers a glimpse. Every journey is unique, and this is simply one perspective: mine. As I mention in the preface, no two experiences are the same.

But, if you’ve attended a retreat yourself, you might find familiar echos in the stories. Maybe a laugh, maybe a tear. In whatever way this meets you, I’d love to hear what it stirs. Questions, critiques, or reflections are all welcome. I’m deeply grateful for every reader who follows along. If you engage regularly and share thoughts along the way, I’d be honored to include your name in the acknowledgments when the book is complete.

If you’re receiving this first article, it means you’re subscribed to my main newsletter, Falling Into Place. However, if this particular journey doesn’t resonate with you, please feel free to unsubscribe. No hard feelings, I promise.

Subscribe now

This journey is both exciting and, if I’m honest with myself, still a little tender. But I’m learning to step into the unknown with openness. I’m glad you’re here alongside me.

A Note About Access

The full manuscript will eventually be published, so I’m placing the bulk of the content behind a paywall. This is to protect the work while it’s in progress. Every post will include at least one section from the book, usually more, depending on how revisions unfold that week. I’m aiming to release new sections on Mondays and Thursdays.

Thank you for walking this path with me. It means more than you know.

Deepest gratitude (kataññutā),
Glenn

Preface

The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.

— Zen Proverb

The Finger & The Moon

I write this as an attempt to translate something that felt beyond words. A five-day vipassanā retreat, distilled into language — though I know language could never capture the depth of my own direct experience.

This memoir is, first and foremost, my own effort to remember. To relive the moments that revealed something true. To remind myself of what I touched in stillness.

But words are never "Truth." They can only point in its direction.

A few days before leaving, I told my son about the retreat. “I won’t be talking for a week,” I explained, “not even making eye contact with people.”

He furrowed his brow, concerned. “Oh no, Dad. You aren’t going to make it. You LOVE to talk.” He shook his head. “There’s no way.”

I laughed. “You might be right.” And, to be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure he wasn’t.

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