Crossing Nebraska

  I’m so excited that this labor of love is coming to fruition! Final editing is underway. The beautiful cover artwork by Sophie Binder Designs is complete. I hope to have this book in your hands soon! That Which We Already Know  is about stillness of mind. Part childhood memoir, part spiritual enquiry, part psychological and philosophical exploration,  That Which We Already Know  paints a picture of our fall from grace and ultimate redemption via the recollection of childhood truth: that we arise in this world with an innate capacity to experience stillness. There is nothing for us to learn in this regard. We simply need ease our adopted selves out of the way in order to realize how very much we already know. That Which We Already Know  began as a flash of inspiration upon waking one morning. It seemed that in an instant I saw the arc of my life with perfect clarity. Raised Christian, I’ve been a practicing Zen Buddhist for nearly thirty years. This book recou...

From That Which We Already Know . This passage is from Chapter Nine of my forthcoming book: It likely goes without saying that I was a quiet child, pulled as if by some magnetic attraction to places of solitude that weren’t always easy to find. You see, my father was then a young schoolteacher, with a family that was fast outgrowing our modest home. Compounding matters was the fact that entrance to my older sister’s bedroom required passage straight through mine. Thus, I had no quiet space inside that I could really call my own. I had to find it. Cover Artwork And that is how the Nursery became my refuge from the moment I was old enough to venture out beyond the garden gate. I could be alone there to enjoy the silence whenever I needed. Perhaps that’s another reason Mark Patrick’s tiny room was so appealing, sparse as a monk’s quarters though it was. Sure, his half brother was around for at least some of the time, but things must be different with a brother, I likely reasoned. But thi...

From That Which We Already Know . This passage is from Chapter Four of my forthcoming book. Included in the assortment of Christmas ornaments that my family unpacked each holiday season was a set of six sturdy aluminum foil snowflakes in those anodized metal colorings now so familiar to us all: blue, green, red, violet, silver, and gold. They unfolded from the flatness of their latent state into eight-pointed wonders for which I took personal responsibility. Perhaps because of their size—they were about as big around as dinner plates—they usually ended up becoming my personal bedroom decorations. I’d climb up on the stepladder and attach their strings to the plaster ceiling with asterisks of masking tape that occasionally required a supplemental strip or two over the course of the holiday season. Cover Artwork I liked to watch them as I fell asleep. They’d spin one way when the furnace kicked on and then gradually unwind once it kicked off again, over and over again. I recall my paren...

From That Which We Already Know . This passage is the introduction to my forthcoming book: The back gate of the very first home I ever knew opened onto a tract of land that I’ll not forget for as long as I may live. Ostensibly, it served as the nursery for nearby Gerhardt Gardens. By the time I arrived on the scene, however, the various plots of shrubs and saplings had become so overgrown as to seem more like wilderness to the child that I was. If not exactly wilderness, it was a crazy quilt of different habitats stitched together and overlaid with whatever weeds, grasses, and woodland succession plants happened to have put down roots and begun working their way toward the sun. Notwithstanding its state of near abandonment, we still referred to those 20-odd acres of beautiful wildness as the Nursery. If nothing else, it was a nursery for young minds. Cover Artwork A well-worn path headed east from that gate, through a dark patch of woods squeezed between the corrugated steel fence of a...