Overview

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi founded the San Francisco Zen Center in 1962, and after fifty years we have seen a fine group of Zen masters trained in the west take up the mantle and extend the practice of Zen in ways that might have been hard to imagine in those first early years. Susan Murphy, one of Robert Aitken’s students and dharma heirs, is one of the finest in this group of young Zen teachers. She is also a fine writer, and following on the teaching of her Roshi she has engaged her spiritual work in the ordinary world, dealing with the practice of daily life and with the struggles of all beings. We know that our earth is in crisis, but is the situation beyond repair? Are we on a path of planetary disaster where the only proper response is to prepare for our melancholic dystopian future? Is there a way out of our suspicious cynicism? In the tradition of Thomas Berry, using this spiritual opportunity to change the very nature of our crisis, Susan Murphy offers a profound message, subtly presented with clarity and assurance, showing that engaged Buddhism provides a possible path to the necessary repair and healing.

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9781619023048

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Praise for Modernist Women Poets The poems collected in Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology are diverse, but they are linked, too. Each seems to gaze directly and speak indirectly -- or sometimes vice-versa -- in that quintessentially modernist mode, even as the particulars of intention and expression are distinct and individual. [...] How inspiring and heartening it is to read their daring attempts to do something entirely new with language, undertaken both in seriousness and wild play. -- Bookslut coeditors Hass (a former U.S. Poet Laureate) and Ebenkamp have produced that rare, valuable thing: a volume that could be at once a resource for educators, and a fine entree for the general reader. -- Publisher's Weekly Starred ReviewPraise for Robert Hass [Robert] Hass has significantly broadened the role of poet laureate to include not only his love for poetry but also his concern for literacy and his passion for environmentalism. -- Los Angeles Times No Practicing poet has more talent than Robert Hass. -- The Atlantic Monthly

Murphy does not shy away from the stark realities of the destruction we are wreaking in every ecosystem on Earth. And though her book is dense with facts, it reads like poetry or a series of koans. The reader can feel the author's presence, the inspiration of her roosters and dog, and the rhythmic shadow of trees and winter grass outside her window. It's a book that must be absorbed slowly. -- The Shambhala Sun

Author Information

Susan Murphy is the founding teacher of Zen Open Circle in Sydney, Australia and leads Sesshin training in Sydney and Melbourne. She is also a filmmaker and producer. Her first book was Upside–Down Zen, Finding the Marvelous in the Ordinary. She was authorized to teach by Ross Bolleter and John Tarrant, both dharma heirs to Robert Aitken of the Diamond Sangha branch of the Harada–Yasutani lineage.

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