Seattle in Zazen

In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s, there are few.

After a year hiatus, the turtle emerges from the frozen land of Minnesota with a story.

Last August, I sat on a park bench and tried to focus on breathing.¹ But stillness eluded me. The air was hot and sticky, and mosquitos feasted on my blood, which usually boiled with rage over their incessant slurping. Then, for a moment, my hatred was replaced by a thought: The average male mosquito lives for seven days.

Two thousand mosquito generations have passed during my lifetime, and so too would this one. By next week, the micro-vampires on my skin would perish.

Then I considered Earth and how most landmasses have seen 30,000 human generations. A centenarian’s entire existence has passed between a land’s breath.

Earlier that summer, I had moved from Seattle, where I had lived for five years. My existence on that chunk of land was relatively shorter than the time a mosquito spends sucking blood from my leg.

If a mosquito could leave such an impression on my leg, I wondered about my impact on Seattle. But who was Seattle before I met her?

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Mother Earth delivered an isthmus of 84 square miles well before concepts like isthmus, miles, and time emerged. This chunk of land didn’t have a name for most of its existence, and it never cared whether it did or what that name could be. Instead, this daughter of Mother Earth defined herself by her siblings: Puget Sound hugged her western edge, and the Cascade Range towered to her east. We now call this isthmus Seattle. Despite the grating glaciers and vomiting volcanoes that plagued them, Seattle and her siblings learned to sit and breathe.

Seattle inhaled, seeing her first people.

The Coast Salish pulled salmon from Puget Sound and built longhouses along the shore to protect their goods from the moody weather. These people divided themselves into the Duwamish and Suquamish, but their leader—Chief Si’ahl, whose name inspired hers—cared more about similarities than differences. Seattle observed these inhabitants, for although their forms differed from hers, their essence did not. They seemed to know of a world beyond hers, so they held this one lightly.

Seattle exhaled, feeling the people, trees, and rocks upon her spine.

Different people arrived, aspiring to transform Seattle into a city. They twisted her trees into structures and built them quicker and closer than those of the previous people but didn’t stop harvesting once the structures were built. Saws buzzed, timbers cracked, and the ground shook as trees rolled down her slopes to the waterfront. As logs floated off Seattle into the Sound, fish were hauled from the Sound into Seattle to feed the growing city. The land was scarred, but she didn’t feel much change. The heat of forest fires returned in 1889, and timber burned as it always had, transforming the new town to ash. But the people brought brick, steel, and other earthly contortions to concoct another city.

Seattle inhaled as her scars began to fade.

Seattle had long defined herself by her topography, but the people of the new city were determined to change that.² Gold was said to lie in the Klondike, so the people made her a hub for fortune seekers. As “Gateway to the Yukon,” Seattle became home to opportunists who sold inaccurate maps, faulty gear, and dogs that could smell gold. Brothels and bars sprouted overnight to entertain prospectors. The city grew from the promise of gold—larger than it had from logging and fishing. Under this ambition, mankind plowed one of her seven hills into the Sound.

Seattle exhaled, releasing her identification with the hills and shoreline.

A needle rose into space as the city changed, but not only in appearance. Unlike her shifting land, the people held the same shape. Yet, their energy had changed, or at least their ability to express it. In the lead-up to the new millennium, they shared with the outside world their inside one, flitting sensations like anger, fear, and disgust: Grunge, they called it, an expression of truth without polish.

Seattle inhaled, resting with whatever sensations made themselves known.

The people did not remain still. They learned to contort the Earth in new ways—structures now scraped the sky, and servers streamed software in silence. Planes lifted their wheels and disappeared above the clouds, while others emerged like rain. Like the longhouses of the Salish, warehouses labeled Costco and Amazon spread across the land, holding everything but salmon while the fish refilled the Sound. These changes were neither separate from Seattle nor one with her.

Seattle exhaled, unburdened by duality.

My five-year presence in the Ballard neighborhood was hardly a thought bubble to Seattle. Yet, the speed of change I witnessed on her bearded chin was unprecedented. I watched mechanic shops convert to breweries and entire blocks of single-family homes twist into townhouses. A collection of three dozen lawnmowers rusting on the corner morphed into a Cybertruck. I biked uphill in the rain over her extreme topography, oblivious to the scars masked by glass and concrete.

Like a mosquito on my leg, I left no impact on Seattle. But as life-affirming as my blood is to a mosquito, so were the years in Seattle to me. I evolved my career, made friends, endured pandemics, and rode out my twenties. But before Seattle could inhale again, I was gone—another mosquito in passing.

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What’s Next?

Expect a new essay from me on the first Wednesday of the month. Compared to articles in 2023, 2025’s newsletters will be less pragmatic and more philosophical. Less direct, more exploratory. Less about work, more about mythology, language, history, and culture. Like Seattle, Turtle’s Pace is a work of perpetual reinvention.

Let’s begin again.

1. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, 1970.

2. Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle by Murray Morgan, 1983.