It started with a dog
It started with a dog. But to understand why, I have to start somewhere else.
In 2015, by every external measure, my life was good. A career I was proud of, good people around me, a beautiful apartment in New York City. And yet I felt an unnamed pressure tightening my chest, the city’s relentless demand for productivity and optimization. The kind of growth that stifles the soul. So one day I simply stopped. I kept going to work, but each evening I came home and did nothing at all. No phone, no productivity. Just a simple meal, some music, two weeks of stillness. At the end of it, out of nowhere, I had a spiritual awakening that rearranged everything. It left me with a simple truth: what counts is real, unhurried time with the people we love.
So I quit. I gave up the apartment and went out on the road with my parents, and then, when my best friend Rahul Desikan was diagnosed with ALS, I spent a year and a half as his full-time caregiver until he died in 2019. Sitting beside someone you love as they lose motor function teaches you something: the most valuable thing one person can give another is to be fully present. To be there, without flinching. I didn’t know it yet, but that lesson would become the ground the Collective is built on.
After years of wandering, including a stay at a closed Zen temple in Brooklyn through the pandemic and friends’ couches in Europe, Canada and the US, I landed back in New York in the fall of 2022, with a borrowed apartment on the Upper West Side and a cold I couldn’t shake. The cold is important. It meant I couldn’t follow through with quitting coffee just yet, so I went looking for a sunny place to sit outside with a latte. I found Black Press Coffee on Columbus Avenue, and I sat down with a book of poems.
A group nearby was laughing and talking, and one of them turned to me: “What are you reading?” Poetry. “Are you a poet?” No. “Then why the hell are you reading poetry?” That was Jeff. Beside him were Paula, Bill Hyman, and Bill’s dog, Lucy. Jeff asked me to read something uplifting, so I found an Ada Limón poem about the greening of the trees after winter, “a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us,” and read it aloud on the sidewalk to people I’d met ten minutes earlier. I started coming back every day.
The one person always there was Bill, with Lucy. We’d sit for five or six hours. Bill complained he was gaining weight because of me. But we talked to so many beautiful people and learned that everyone has a story. Lucy was the real star. People couldn’t resist her, and conversations bloomed around this gentle dog who would sit on my lap for hours. We started a WhatsApp thread so people would know that if they came, someone would be there to talk to. Someone who would listen. The community kept growing.
Among the people we met were extraordinary musicians, and we kept realizing our neighbors had no idea they were living right beside such talent. So with our friend Shiv, a musician himself, we began hosting musical salons in his apartment. They were pure joy. But they got too big. We could host thirty people maximum, which meant deciding who was in and who was out. That felt wrong. We needed a bigger room.
We found it at the Triad Theater. And the first night there gave us a surprising moment that would name us. But that’s a story for next time.
We’ve since become a 501(c)3 nonprofit, with a partner, a board, and nine magical Nights at the Triad behind us. But the heart of it never changed. It started with the silent pressure this city can create and then two weeks of silence. A friend’s death and everything it taught me about presence. A cold, a book of poems, and a dog who knew how to turn strangers into friends. We didn’t plan any of it. We just kept showing up for each other, and paid attention to what wanted to grow.
The Four Hands Collective is a nonprofit on New York’s Upper West Side. If this resonated, come to a show — fourhandscollective.org.
