Podcast
“I Simply Couldn’t Open My Mouth”
"I Simply Couldn't Open My Mouth" is an offering from the friends and students of Kōtatsu John Bailes: American Dharma teacher, Soto Zen priest, Buddhist chaplain, poet, former around-the-world sailboat captain and port master.
John is the founder and guiding teacher of One Heart Zen, an online and community-based sangha rooted in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. John studied for 13 years with Zentatsu Richard Baker, practiced closely with Zenshin Philip Whalen, and received transmission from Zoketsu Norman Fischer.
Each episode features a new or archival extemporaneous Dharma expression with and through John, as recorded and shared by the One Heart Zen sangha.
Suggested donation per episode: $7 via Venmo @One-Heart-Zen
IG: @oneheartzen
Substack: https://substack.com/@johnbailes1
Learn more athttps://oneheartzen.org/
- Episodes
- 6
- Releases
- Twice a week
- Typical length
- 40 min
- On air since
- 2026
- Latest episode
- 2 days ago
Episodes
6 episodes, newest first
-
40 min
Swallowing the Burr (October 31, 2026)
Season 1, Episode 6
Show notes
Digesting,
metabolizing,
evacuating
(to put it politely)
the subject-object fantasy.
In zazen,
we learn to clear
our throats
and breathe
with all beings.
Taking care of life,
Life takes care
of itself.
-
34 min
Exposing One's Self (October 27, 2026)
Season 1, Episode 5
Show notes
Caught in the finger trap,
the adamantine net,
only yielding offers release.
When the teacher screams,
one is fully naked:
"I don't know",
most intimate.
-Kaishin Michael LoStracco
-
48 min
On Letting Go of Letting Go (October 24, 2026)
Show notes
Make believe
real worlds--
“I” and “love” and “you”
Make believe,
In real time,
Being, time
Kalpas, moments--
Butterfly wearing down
Tiger mountain
Time, to let go:
Letting go, time.
In time, one lets go.
…Let's go, then
You and I
When the mind is spread out
like the sky…
“You”, “I”
“One”
“lets”
“go”
"mind"
No paradox
-Kaishin Michael LoStracco
*Note on this episode: In the course of John's extemporaneous dharma expression, he said that 250,000 hectares were cut for a data center. He later corrected himself: it was 250,000 trees that were cut for said data center. See: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/oct/22/finland-google-felling-trees-datacentre
-
41 min
Warm Hospitality, Spit in the Face (October 17, 2026)
Season 1, Episode 3
Show notes
washing with dirt,
spit-clean.
the body, a crucible,
self pouring out of its edges,
now only weather.
stories upon stories,
none attributable truth...
not unlike improv!
warm hospitality, beginner's gate
like spit in the face.
not arbitrary, not capricious,
wholly there--
grim and beautiful alike--
total unity.
-Kaishin Michael LoStracco (10.17.26)
-
31 min
Endosymbiosis on Blue Mountain (October 6, 2026)
Season 1, Episode 2
Show notes
22:36:06 Still Sunday, actually Sunday-night.
Reading John Balaban’s poetry I am overcome.
That I might have known him more this time around and do not.
This poem alone makes me want to drive from Boston to North
Carolina just to pay my respects...
R E S P E C T
-Kotatsu John Bailes
Endosymbiosis
Reading an acquaintance’s poetry.
His book of said stumbled upon
while almost packing books
into “categories” or “groupings”
before boxing for moving day.
An acquaintance in this lifetime
but more than likely a dear friend
at some other point in our transmigrations:
humus, moisture, clouds, rain,
trees, grass, oceans, estuaries.
Transmigrating beings bacteria, archaea,
when some lonesome ancient prokaryotic
cell engulfed a bacterium that became
the mitochondrion through which we
met in the process of merging then
parted.
Always remembered.
-Kotatsu John Bailes
Crossing West Nebraska, Looking for Blue Mountain
Where can one find the real Blue Mountain?
Inside the Blue Mountain at Waggoner’s Gap,
is there another, pulsing cool azure light?
Can one drive west and find Blue Mountain?
Will anyone ever live there but me?
Some say that Blue Mountain is very small
and is rocking in the zion of a waterbead.
They claim to find it everywhere , even in clouds
of atmospheric dust snapping with strontium
and settling on the grasslands this evening.
Although Blue Mountain is only as large as a thought,
its sides drop off into dark crags; its steep slopes
are smooth as glass. Its aspect is discouraging.
But from its peak, one can see everything clearly.
In humming fields, beetles, aphids, weevils, ants.
Fox pups frisking in bluebells before their burrow.
A naked boy and a girl dogpaddling an inner tube
in bayou waters, off a levee near Big Mamou.
Subterranean rocks grinding in the San Andreas Fault.
A Malay fisherman, perched on a spit of rock off Penang,
hurling a circling net into surf at sunset.
A bloated mare giving foal in a clover field in Kent.
A blindfolded teenager, shoeless, slumped against a tree
as the firing squad walks of in Montevideo.
Missiles hidden like moles in Siberian silos.
A Black man, in red cotton shirt and khaki pants, his skin
alive with protozoan welts, sipping coffee in a Congo shop.
An eel sliding through a corpse’s yellowed ribs
in a Mekong swamp where frogs croak and egrets fish.
Ice sparkling the coats of hundreds of reindeer with
steaming nostrils, crossing a Lapland river under a moon.
As I pass in the dark through this sleeping town
the only creatures moving on Main Street are moths.
Spinning orbits about the lamps, they fall and die.
Their husks rustle like leaves in the fluorescent light.
Were they flying to Blue Mountain? Am I there?
-John Balaban, from his book Passing Through a Gate: Poems, Essays, and Translations
-
46 min
Speaking & Listening Are One (October 3, 2026)
Season 1, Episode 1
Show notes
Moxibustion!
Banana slugs!
Smoke & goo—
continuous arising,
abiding, extinguishing
into
the humus and clouds
of the world,
which is us—
you & me—
no one speaking,
no one listening,
the salmon
in the tree.
-Kaishin Michael LoStracco (10.3.26)
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