Buddhist Influencer Tyler Knott Gregson offers spiritual tools to cope during COVID-19
A cropped selfie of Tyler Knott Gregson’s quarantine haircut that he posted on his Instagram account @tylerknott.
Turbulence rattles the cabin as the plane zooms over the Atlantic at 36,000 feet. Tyler Knott Gregson feels his heartbeat racing and his palms sweating, and he pulls out a napkin stamped with the airline’s logo.
He scribbles a haiku on the back of it. Five syllables, then seven, then five.
The world slowly starts coming back into focus with each counted beat.
He decides to do this every day, write a simple haiku. It becomes a meditative practice as well as a creative one. Eleven years and 3,000 haikus later, he hasn’t missed a day.
Combining Buddhism, Haiku poetry and meditative photography, Gregson offers insight into coping with chaos, loss and isolation experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic from his own experiences struggling with autism. He shares his artwork and his journey with more than 350,000 Instagram followers, self-identified “Chasers of the Light.”
An unlikely encounter
In 1994 Gregson’s father, a lifelong professional in the baseball industry and cradle Presbyterian scrambled through his hotel room in Saudi Arabia after a business trip.
The time for check-out loomed closer. He had curated souvenirs for all of his children, except his son, he had realized only now. Rummaging through the hotel room for something presentable, he opened the nightstand drawer. In a perfect row, he saw the usual suspects: a Bible, a Quran and then a book containing the teachings of Buddha. The cover had a colorful picture which he thought would appeal to his somewhat unusual son.
919 Likes, 14 Comments - Tyler Knott Gregson (@tylerknott) on Instagram: "Typewriter Series #2941 by Tyler Knott Gregson . Another custom poem! Wahoo! Keep the orders..."
He shoved the book in his bag and left for the airport.
The child of a Presbyterian father and a Catholic mother, Gregson had grown up in a somewhat traditional religious landscape. While they spent significant time traveling, when they were home they made a regular pilgrimage to the local Presbyterian church.
“I was always, not cynical, but curious,” Gregson said, recounting his years of butting heads with the church. “I kept a watchful eye.”
A formative memory of his Presbyterian pastor still resonates. Garbed in a white church robe with crosses dangling on each side, he stood at the pulpit with an unorthodox message.
“He started saying things like God told him everyone needed to up their offerings and maybe they could put a basketball hoop in,” Gregson said.
Throughout the semicircle of pews, congregants nodded quietly and began reaching for their checkbooks. “It felt like I was alone in a sea of people agreeing because they didn’t know what else to do. Like there was this wave of popular opinion, and I was staring at it confused and lost and saddened.” Gregson said. “I just thought, there’s no way God told him that. It alienated me.”
He stood up and walked out of the church, and he didn’t look back.
The last-minute gift from his father provided an unlikely gateway into a new world of meaning.
At 12 years old, with the colorful, contraband book in his hands, Gregson grappled with a new way of thinking. “I felt like a weird kid. I learned and related in a different way,” he said, describing his challenges with autism. “And [Buddhism] felt right in a way nothing else had. To have this outlet that felt like mine, I fell in love with it and read everything I could get my hands on.”
For Gregson, art and Buddhism are two central and interconnected ways of coping with autism. It is no coincidence, he said, that he fell in love with both at the same time.
The Broken Piano
One day, a substitute teacher walked into Helena High School, and before administering the exam, immediately made Gregson move his desk to the front of the room.
His teacher had left a cautionary note: “Tyler has a cheating problem.”
“In school, I hated it. Anything with that much structure was really hard for me.” Gregson said. “I would be sitting in class and have this urge, and I literally felt like I was on fire, and I had to leave, but in school, you can’t do that 37 times, and if you don’t have a pass you can’t walk.”
There were rules for how students were supposed to take notes, engage the material, and behave in class, which Gregson often found himself unable to follow.
He forged doctors notes to get out of class and could rarely be found sitting quietly in attention. Despite his unorthodox classroom behavior and frequent absenteeism, he maintained excellent grades, much to the suspicion of his supervisors.
At one point, school officials forced him to take an IQ test. “Autism wasn’t something people understood. They couldn’t think of someone just needing to do things differently,” Gregson said.
His struggles continued throughout his adult life. In confrontations with teachers, bosses and supervisors, he chafed against rigid systems.
“The only way I was able to get through was escaping into my notebook, scribbling out poems that made sense to me,” Gregson said. The rules didn’t apply here.
The looseness of poetry appealed to him, and his Buddhist spirituality provided a framework for dealing with ostracization and pain.
One Buddhist truth lies at the core of Gregson’s practice and his art: “Life is suffering.”
“People hear that and think that’s a negative view, but that’s only if you assume suffering has to be a negative thing. But it can shine a brighter light on everything else,” Gregson said. “If you have this cup, and it’s a beautiful cup, you can either be devastated that the cup is broken or you can grab the cup when it is given to you, knowing it will eventually break, so every moment before it shatters is a gift.”
This view allowed Gregson to glide over many typical high school woes and more severe challenges in his adolescent and adult life. Coping with the suicides of those close to him and a brutal custody battle for his sister when he was young, Gregson has forged meaning out of uncertainty and loss. These themes and insights naturally inform his art.
“I tend to write about the beauty in broken things and the beauty in hardships more than the beauty in joyous times,” Gregson said. “Because a lot of people feel broken, and a lot of people feel lost, and that doesn’t have to be a negative, scary thing.”
The lines from one of his free-verse poems read:
Do broken pianos
play broken songs?
Do they play busted melodies
for busted hearts?
Is there a song living inside it
that’s waiting to get out?
Her keys are shattered and her notes long since silent
but I can still hear her song.
Just listen, just listen
The first typewriter poem: the art of noticing
Several years into his journey of replacing the morning newspaper and crossword puzzle with a daily haiku, Gregson stumbled into a little antique store in a Helena shopping center.
Upon walking in, his eye immediately gravitated to a dusty Remington Rand 17 Typewriter in the corner. He ripped out the blank front page of a book he had just purchased and placed it into the slit and started typing without thinking.
“I couldn’t edit it. I couldn’t delete or change lines. It just poured out of me,” Gregson said. “I was more of a conduit than a conductor.”
Upon the encouragement of Sarah Linden, who has since become his wife, he snapped a photo of the words and uploaded it to Instagram.
The prints provided an easy visual format and the decisiveness of working on a typewriter helped him dodge perfectionism and posturing. The “Typewriter Series” was born.
Accustomed to writing daily, he added a typewriter poem to his morning ritual, and people quickly started to pay attention to his work. “They were sharing and commenting, and I just really think I struck a chord not many people had, speaking to that lonely place in a lot of us,” Gregson said.
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For Gregson, writing and spirituality go hand-in-hand. It’s a form of meditation, often rooted in physical observations and small acts of noticing. The cracks in a window. The way two lovers’ hands curl when they embrace. The subtle, grey lining of a cumulus cloud.
These microscopic details provide the building blocks of his meditative practice. Extending these principles to photography came as a natural if not immediate transition.
In 2005, Gregson photographed his first wedding, which he recalls as an overwhelming experience. Shooting for 14 hours straight, he felt the need to capture every single moment. But, the artistry, he said, comes in the act of capturing the “micro-moments” that tell the story.
In order to encapsulate a moment, you have to be truly present in it, he said. It provided another outlet for him to express his particular experience of the world. “Photography was a way that I could show people how the world looked to me, and I couldn’t stop.”
In the intervening years, Gregson and his team have shot 165 weddings across the globe, traveling to Scotland, Jamaica, Turks and Caicos, Mexico, Canada and Ireland.
Shortly after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, he was invited to capture the wedding of two women in Georgia. “Nobody in the crowd had come to a gay wedding before, and we were in the South, where these people had experienced so much hate, and you could feel the anticipation in the air, and the love, and we were all sobbing,” Gregson said. “We felt lucky, and it made our jobs make sense.”
The raw emotion of weddings combined with the busyness of the day makes for gems in photography. By remaining still and attentive in the chaos, he captures aspects that are often overlooked. The principles of mediation make for a good artist, he said.
One traditional Buddhist Meditation technique involves envisioning concentric circles extending inward from the largest to the smallest and almost imperceptible one. With each circle, one notices the sounds closest to her, a door creaking or footsteps in the other room, then tunes in further to hear the softest sounds. Some practitioners claim to hear the earth turning.
“I feel like I do the same thing with photography and writing,” Gregson said. “I try to make the little things seem really big and represent the really big things in the really small details.”
Chasing the Light
One summer afternoon, the last wisps of summer light inched toward the horizon, revealing the first hints of orange, purple and yellow. Encumbered with camera equipment, lighting gear and the tiredness of a day’s work shooting a wedding, Gregson launches through the still Montana air in a full sprint. The sound of feet thumping echoes through the wooded grove as the emerging colors adopt full vibrancy across the sky.
He had planned to capture the display on film. Now he just stands still beneath it as the sky turns to orange, then purple, then black.
“We had literally chased the light,” Gregson said. That was the moment that birthed the name of a way of living.
“It is that mentality that we are going to chase these beautiful moments, whether it is a sunset or moments between people, we will chase every inch of blissful beauty,” Gregson said. “I want to get people to realize those moments are everywhere for them too, it’s about noticing.”
Liza Vandenboom is a student at The King’s College, an intern at Religion Unplugged, and a religion columnist for the Empire State Tribune.