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Paradise in Plain Sight: Lessons from a Zen Garden
Paradise in Plain Sight Lessons from a Zen Garden Author:Karen Maezen Miller From the author of two beloved books about finding the spirituality in each day comes a book about finding the spirituality in each place. Zen teacher and all-American mom Karen Maezen Miller, author of Momma Zen and Hand Wash Cold, in her new book tells us how to cultivate the garden beneath our feet, a paradise hidden in plain sight. — In the s... more »ummer of 1997, after a string of personal disappointments and wrong turns, Miller and her husband stood in the backyard of an empty house on a quiet street in a suburb of Los Angeles. The yard was Southern California?s oldest private Japanese garden, an oasis of ponds and pines that had stood intact for nearly a hundred years. Flush with faith but light on know-how, they moved in and started work. The book uses the lessons of the garden to show how a seeker becomes a sage.
The first part shows how to find the garden always waiting right at our feet: stepping beyond disappointment, fear, selfishness, confusion and doubt. In the second part, readers see how the ageless elements of the garden—rocks, roots, ponds, and trees—offer lessons in how we, too, can transcend the winds of time and turmoil. The third part offers the gifts of a garden: the fruit, flowers, leaves—even weeds—of spiritual maturity. With these come forgiveness, compassion, joy, and the effortless ease of letting go. Each chapter introduces and explores a Zen koan or quotation, allowing readers to glimpse the intuitive wisdom of their own awakened minds.
Miller?s teachings speak directly to the anxious ills that overwhelm us. Her lessons are pragmatic and personal, grounded in the simple truths of our natural world. Gently insistent, her voice conveys the intimacy of a face-to-face encounter, the living transmission of Zen. The book is also an elegy to her departed teacher Taizan Maezumi Roshi, a humble giant of American Zen, who once gardened the same ground.
In the tradition of the finest spiritual writing, Paradise in Plain Sight speaks beyond religious divisions to all those with a wounded heart and weary mind, confronting the questions we can only settle for ourselves. It is an emphatic and encouraging guide for anyone trying to plant the seeds of mindfulness in their own backyard.« less