Zen for the Rest of Us Eightfold: Zen Poetry for Blindly Clasping Beings is a collection of sixty poemsthat will meet you where you are—muddy, submerged, gasping—and remind you: this is where the lotus grows. Shaped by the author's ongoing dialogue with secular Buddhist thought, these verses offer empathy for the very real struggle of quieting the mind, illuminate the tension between spiritual aspiration and lived reality, and reflect on Buddhist teachings, practices, and precepts—all from the grounded, imperfect perspective of a lay practitioner striving to live these principles (but, perhaps, at times, fumbling along the way.) Flowing throughthe overarching themes of wisdom, action, and focus, and rooted in a layperson's struggle to find presence in the world, Eightfoldexplores the raw, human experiences of craving, desire, suffering--and the challenging act of clawing out to balance. Poems include a retelling of the story of Siddhartha's transformation into the Buddha modern interpretive dialogues with the Eightfold Path, reflections on howthe Three Marks of Existence shape our lives, our societies, and the planet itself, and commentary on howhuman nature, the suffering woven into daily life, and the modern challenges we create for ourselves fit into the Buddhist worldview. Rather than a picture-perfect guide to enlightenment being spouted from an author behind monastery walls, or a narrative from someone claiming to have reachedunceasingnirvana, these poems engage with the Eightfold Path as an in-progressprocess—one that anyone, no matter how floundering you might be, can join in on. Eightfold: Zen Poetry for Blindly Clasping Beings is, thus, Zen for the rest of us. For the blind, the clasping, and all those ever-reaching for liberation, this is the book you want to bring to your meditation cushion.
