Welcome to Little Birds. It’s named after the messengers who fly along the backs of dragons as they lay down the lines of energy that make the world. As the grand work of dragons unfolds, little birds spread the gossip about it. This site is a transit point for my work in progress, journal entries, fragments, bright shards, finger exercises, field notes, marginalia — what leads up to, and what gets left out of, my published writing. It’s called miscellaneous in a nod to the Miscellaneous Koans collections that koan schools develop : idiosyncratic, evolving — the stories held under the robe, next to the heart. For the next few months we’ll be posting excerpts from the archive of my past dharma talks. I’m a teacher in the koan tradition of Zen, now retired. More of my work is available at Cloud Dragon, where you can read over twenty years of writing and subscribe to monthly talks and occasional videos from the archives. We’re also on Facebook. Here at Little Birds, new work gets posted about once a week. Another recurring feature is Work in the Room, which raises the gorgeous impossibilities that are part of koan study, one of the things I miss most about teaching. If you like, keep company with this week’s impossible and see what happens. The motto of Awakened Life, the community I retired from, is enlightenment as a conspiracy of friends. In that spirit, we invite you to become a patron and join the conversation. With warm thanks, Joan Sutherland

Due to health, Joan will be posting infrequently, though Patreon members will receive a Cloud Dragon Dharma Works subscription, two audio recordings of past dharma talks sent to your inbox every month. (May 4, 2023)