One Blade of Grass

July 15, 2019
Buddhist and poet Shukman (Archangel) shares his journey into Zen in this stirring but slow-moving memoir. Shukman reflects on key moments of his life to unpack his emotions and frustrations, opening with the dual traumas during his youth of his parents’ divorce and his extreme eczema. Later, while traveling in South America, he experienced a confusing and profound spiritual moment he could not explain. In the ensuing years, he attempted to recreate it with transcendental meditation before trying Zen meditation. He recounts his fitful attempts at practice and breakthroughs alongside his romantic experiences and professional travel writing assignments. Initially, Shukman yearned for enlightenment, but resisted taking the step of dedicating himself as a monk. He eventually attaches to the Sanbo Kyodan lineage and progresses by working through the traditional koans. He closes with the beginnings of his time as a teacher at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in New Mexico. While Shukman’s lovely prose excavates his past to reveal evocative feelings tied to his fears of inadequacy, the overly deliberate narrative tends to drag as he lingers on mundane details and events for too long. This memoir will resonate most with readers wanting to understand the slow, rocky process of practicing Zen. Agent: Anne Edelstein, Anne Edelstein Literary.

September 1, 2019
How Zen led one man to awareness of the miraculous. When he was 19, traveling in South America, award-winning poet, novelist, and travel writer Shukman (Archangel, 2013, etc.) had an experience so shattering that he could hardly put it into words. "I thought I wanted to go out and see the world," he reflected soon after. "Instead it was the other way round: the world opened its arms and pulled me in. What did it all mean?" As he recounts in a graceful, insightful, and disarmingly candid memoir, he spent the rest of his life trying to answer that question. The son of academics headed for Cambridge and, he thought, a career in academia himself, Shukman was not given to spiritual or mystical speculation. However, he felt overwhelmed by the "numinous grace" that enveloped him on the beach, a feeling that freed him from his "ordinary self, with its cravings and complaints." Among those complaints was severe and persistent eczema: "itch and pain in the dermis, frustration and misery in the psyche." He sought relief from all manner of medical, psychological, and alternative treatments and finally tried meditation: first transcendental meditation and then Zen. At Zen centers, he felt "a sweetness, a sense of justified indolence, of coming closer to life, to a more authentic self." He went on retreats, emerging with "a sense of having been cleansed, absolved even, and of returning to the world with new eyes." He studied with several masters, one of whom was a traditional koan teacher. A koan, he learned, is a verbal formulation that the student thinks about while meditating and must give up trying to understand but instead "let it reveal itself" to the heart and deepen one's understanding of reality. Zen, Shukman writes, teaches not to withdraw but to accept life, pain, suffering, and beauty: "Unless a path leads us back into the world--reincarnates us, as it were--it's not a complete path." Shukman now leads his own Zen center in New Mexico. A vibrant chronicle of a profound spiritual journey.

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