Setting the Table

Building a Reading Practice in Two Encounters with Old Path White Clouds

– December 15, 2025

I first received a hard copy of Old Path White Clouds (which, for ease going forward, I will refer to as OPWC) from my father after we learned in early September, right around my 32nd birthday, that Drew’s most recent melanoma treatment had failed—catastrophically. The infusion they gave him, aimed at activating the T-cells or TILs he’d received in a previous treatment but hadn’t yet fought off the metastasizing melanoma, hadn’t worked, and the lethality of the medication used had significantly weakened his immune system. As he recovered, spending days and sometimes weeks in the hospital receiving fluids and nutrients, returning to his Boston apartment whenever possible, I began reading Old Path White Clouds. 

Over the course of one or two long sessions, I devoured about 100 pages of the text, barely coming up for air. I remember feeling frustrated immediately that there wasn’t a faster “takeaway”: a more easily findable summary paragraph with the key teachings that I could absorb quickly, and transform into connection with my brother. So, some sort of insight. While I didn’t allow myself to spend much time looking at the statistics (more on that later), I knew, and was told, that “the road was narrowing,” that he was recovering from a physically torturous and depleting series of aggressive treatments, and that much of his longevity depended on the continued efficacy of BRAF. This medication, BRAF, had worked well to manage and shrink his tumors since February 2024, but melanoma biology is known to outsmart this medication after about a year, sometimes less, and usually not much more without the support of another successful therapy/treatment such as TIL. So from September through mid-October, encompassing Drew’s 31st birthday on the 10th, the only remaining bulwark against the aggressively spreading and biochemically adapting melanoma was BRAF. 

While optimism still reigned and I felt confident about several clinical trials opening up in Spring 2026 that looked promising for Drew, I was feeling a time pressure and a need to connect with him, urgently. But little by little, the texting thread became more and more blue: that is, just me sending messages, repetitive platitudes, with intermittent responses from him. When we could get on the phone during this time, the calls were much shorter than our usual 4+ hour weekly sessions in recent years–now, closer to half hour, maybe an hour, before he got tired and had to end the call. 

This is all a circuitous way of saying: my first encounter with OPWC was a desperate attempt for a bridge to my brother Drew on a ticking clock, when connection was increasingly more difficult to sustain, which led to a more consumptive reading practice: frantically scanning to extract insight and absorb meaning in a short period of time. Naturally, it didn’t work. I learned next to nothing and could barely even focus on the text while reading it because my mind was so preoccupied with all the research I was doing about clinical trials, targeted therapies, paired with astrological mapping to predict timing for different trials—all pretty silly, in hindsight and at the time of doing them, but they were my primary avenues for meaning-making and projecting the illusion of control, not to mention a timeline, that functioned purely as a personal palliative. (As you can imagine, reader, if you’re still here: no one at Dana Farber, one of the top melanoma treatment centers in the world, was asking ME about which trials I found most promising for Drew!). But I spent hours researching them on GPT all the same—honestly, way more time doing this ultimately pointless, irrelevant research rather than reading the damn book, which I now regret, of course. 

In mid-October, I set aside OPWC and everything else for about two and a half weeks while I completed an application for a dream job and wrote an article condensing my dissertation project for a top film journal (which would be the centerpiece of my application). During this time, I heard very little from Drew, River, or my mom during this time, which is always a bad sign.  When I asked my father about Drew’s progress, he deflected in a strained voice, and I felt a growing sense of dread. I submitted my materials at the end of October, right around the time Drew went in for a doctor’s appointment on Halloween. 

On Sunday November 2nd, in the late morning, I received a response from Drew over text and an invitation/request to speak on the phone in the afternoon. I eagerly accepted, hoping that this meant he had recovered more substantially and had the energy to talk, because there were so many things I’d discovered in recent months. I couldn’t wait to get his feedback. Prepping for what would hopefully be a lengthy catch-up call, I took my Australian Shepherd, Zipporah, to the local Downing Park (it was, after all, a gorgeous, if not slightly crisp, fall afternoon). The call went in a direction I had neither anticipated nor remotely prepared for—which I plan to write about in more detail in another post—but the long and short of it is that he informed me his prognosis was terminal and he was going to die in about six weeks’ time. Oh, the psychic loops I went on; how I immediately glitched and had to unglitch myself in real time to actually respond like an ethical adult rather than a terrified child… but more on that later. I’m constantly digressing. Redirecting.

Needless to say, after this news, I STOPPED reading OPWC. Perhaps a more enlightened person than me would continue with renewed attention and effort to understand suffering and the path of the Buddha that Drew was so clearly on at that point… but that person was NOT me. After Drew told me about his imminent death—one that I had previously not imagined would come for at least 10-15 years, now happening “well before the end of 2025”—I cycled through anger; mostly it was anger, mixed with a grief that felt so violent and physically overwhelming when it surged up that I would ground myself by putting both hands on the seat of a folding chair next to my desk. 

When the acute anger and after-sadness subsided, usually after 10-15 minutes, I returned to protective numbness and an almost intellectualized resentment about the brutality of the universe and, in my view, what was now the clearest imaginable evidence that there was no divine being, no protective anything, and no cosmic justice or authority to appeal to whatsoever. “Fuck all this spiritual shit,” was my prevailing copium at the time. Kind of an anti-mantra. I began to resent not only the unfairness of my brother’s illness but also the conditions under which he turned to Buddhism in the first place: I was fighting reality. Hoping that this was an alternate, nightmare timeline/plane of existence and very soon the axis of reality would right itself. 

Tragically, it never did—and actually, it continues tilting downward. From what I’ve read, it sounds like that feeling won’t ever go away entirely. So here I am, back at Thich Nhat Hanh’s text, at the very threshold Drew installed as an eternal bridge, when I’m ready to walk across. So I will. But in my second reading, I’ve adopted a reading practice much more aligned with Drew’s principles and philosophies for life, scholarship, and love: slow, immersive, halting, reflective, monastic, overlapping, measured in steady doses over time, and treated as ritualized, rhythmic encounters with the sacred. 

I will read no more than 5 or 6 short chapters per day and not proceed with my reading until I’ve reflected in writing, in walking meditation, over a full night’s sleep, and in resonance with other texts, including The Lotus Sutra and some of my critical theory/psychoanalysis/philosophy texts that may emerge as relevant or generative to this spiritual inquiry and exploratory journey, perhaps even pilgrimage. Still, consistency is important: daily practice, even if that means only in short periods of time. Like working out, writing, learning an instrument, or practicing a language, it is repeatedly demonstrated by various scientific studies and basic logic that consistency over time with 20-or-so-minute daily sessions is far better for developing a skill set than infrequent long sessions. Indeed, in many conversations I had with Drew, we spoke at length about this lifestyle and productivity method/maxim, whose efficacy can be indexed in his work with the classical guitar for nearly a decade. 

Drew exuded humility, reverence, discipline, and inquisitive delight in everything he did, so that will be the spirit in which I approach my encounters with OPWC. Drew also valued clarity, truth, courage; for him, information provides protection, knowledge is a refuge, and curiosity is life-affirming. I feel certain that he would want me to take my time with this text, use whatever literary tools I’ve acquired over the years to engage with it in a serious and sustained way, not take any shortcuts, and give the wisdom of this text as much illumination, translation, and loving treatment as possible. 

That begins later this afternoon, in my next post diving into the first five chapters of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Old Path White Clouds. A full PDF of that text is available on the “Buddhist Practice” tab of “The Drew Banker Project” site, made available by a Buddhist organization; it can also be purchased from Hanh’s printing press, Parallax. 

More soon.