"A brilliant and engaging book on haiku, and on the state of the body and mind required in the million to one shot against producing a good one" -Jim HarrisonFirst published in 1997, Seeds From a Birch Tree introduced readers to the only form of poetry in all of world literature that makes nature into a spiritual path. Its message was simple: Haiku teaches us to return to nature by following the seasons-seventeen syllables at a time.With its mix of...

After years of formal meditation practice. during which he left his wife, his home, and his career to become a Zen Buddhist monk, Clark Strand discovered that the path of meditation is not a journey outward, away from ourselves, but back--to who and what and where we really are. Here, Strand offers us all the richness, depth, and humor of his twenty years as a meditator, and of his apprenticeship under two Zen masters. A book for anyone who has ever...

A modern gospel that is an investigation of the relationship between darkness and the soul. The darkness Clark Strand is talking about here is literal: the darkness of the nighttime, of a world before electricity, when there was a rhythm to life that followed the sun's rising and setting. Strand here offers penetrating insight into the spiritual enrichment that can be found when we pull the plug on our billion-watt culture. He argues that the insomnia...