Zen A to Z, Book l Paperback – April 24, 2025

Zen is about having a child’s imagination, wonder, openness, challenge, and change. ‘Life is suffering.’ but we can nurture an attitude of flexibility, fearlessness, and hope for change and infinite possibilities. Things change in this world and become otherwise in climate, seasons, growth, renewal, and decline. We experience arising and passing, coming and going, high and low in -- rainfall, temperature, snow deposit, and tide. There is suffering, but suffering can end; change can happen in a nanosecond. Change, impermanence, is the only permanence in our world of diversity and wonder. Zen advocates a mindful awareness of who we are and what we must undertake to change our illusions. With openness and curiosity, we can accept with an open heart and alert awareness to embrace this moment -- to hear the breeze, to smell the air, and to be at spacious ease. All human beings yearn to be happy, to be equanimous, and to be free. To be born is enough and we are entitled to these experiences in our lives. These basic human needs give us energy, aliveness, and momentum in life. Spiritual exploration comes from our dissatisfaction — with unexpressed potential, vision, and unfulfilled possibility. The feeling of lack becomes the yearning to be more, to be who we are, to be real, and to be authentic. With our Zen practice of zazen, sitting meditation, we nurture our intrinsic essence of a greater existence and spirit. We recognize the kindred nature of all as one web of existence and love, functioning and flowing with interdependence but also with individual uniqueness. So what I have tried to do in this book of poems is to illuminate our universal essence from A to Z that can be awakened from the practice of Zen. ‘Love Is a Human Search for Wholeness,’ ¥ in human intimacy and spiritual essence. It is our desire to be spaciously one with everything. To awaken, ‘Seek We Must’ to find our true essence, but also to realize that our magnificence is already within us, and we need to seek no more from the outside!'Crossing Over Shifts Our Consciousness’ to the other shore, to a place of clarity, and meaning. We are deeply spiritual beings with goodness, gratitude, and grandeur. Far too often we are in a trance, and we must remember to return to our true magnificence of spaciousness. With openness, we can entertain all arrivals -- anxiety and ecstasy, humiliation and recognition. Whatever arises will soon pass — a joy, fear, sadness, meanness, or blow. Hold it to its journey and let it go. Remember and return to our tender heart; there, in refuge, silence and serenity flow! We are beyond time and mortality, timelessness, and eternity. Birthing and dying cannot change our one existence of essence and infinity, nor interrupt our one ocean of immensity and spirit. The poems and talks in this book are about the remembrance of the deathless magnificence of our existence.¥ In ‘parenthesis’ are the titles of the poems of this book, Zen A to Z. Read more