HERMANN HESSE AND CHARLES JOHNSON

The work of Hermann Hesse has been more influential on my fiction than I sometimes publicly admit. Literary scholars seldom recognize this connection, and I've never bothered to fully explain it, allowing them to emphasize instead the influence of my black American predecessors like Ellison (or John Gardner), as they wished to do. 

However, during my student days, whenever I became interested in a writer, I binged on his work, buying and reading everything in print with his name on it. So in my library I have everything published by and about John Gardner, the complete works of Charles Dickens (an edition from the 1920s), all the published work of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Jean Toomer, a full set of works by Mark Twain, and everything by D.H. Lawrence---the novels, short stories, essays, correspondence, poetry, and critical studies of those writers. Immersing myself in a single writer's entire oeuvre that way allowed me to see their performances at their best and not so best, and that's a good way for a young writer to unlock the mysteries of their techniques, style, and their individual visions. It also serves one well when called upon to write critically about their work.

So it was with Hermann Hesse when I was an undergraduate and translations of his work were very popular with young people on college campuses in the 1960s and '70s. A friend in philosophy gave me a copy of Demian, which I found to be only mildly interesting at the time. But that led me to Siddhartha, which connected perfectly with my own passion for Buddhism and eastern thought. It was a novel that haunted me because Hesse was working with one of the greatest philosophical stories ever told in human experience, in the East or the West: the life of Shakyamuni Buddha, an archetypal, spiritual adventure and quest for liberation. (Thomas Mann, Hesse's friend, also attempted an imaginative "journey to the east" in his story The Transposed Heads: A Tale of India, but I found this foray into eastern thought far less satisfactory than Hesse's work.) Siddhartha haunted me for years and years. I knew I had to respond to it from a black American perspective, and so I did in Oxherding Tale.

But Siddhartha is only one expression of Hesse's vision, albeit the most famous for American readers along with Steppenwolf; I found the others equally fascinating, and realized much of his spiritual probings (and sources) were similar to my own, in addition to his interest in exploring different literary forms like the bundesroman in The Journey to the East, and künstlerroman, the novel of an artist’s growth to maturity in Narcissus and Goldmund. (As a younger man, I read and reread the excellent critical study by Theodore Ziolkowski, The Novels of Hermann Hesse: A Study in Theme and Structure, and often refer to it today.)

For example, in Faith and the Good Thing, when the protagonist Faith Cross contrasts the "magical thinking" of her storytelling father Todd to the materialistic and deterministic visions of the other men she encounters in that novel, "magical thinking" is a direct reference to a phrase by Hesse. And "magical thinking," an alternative to the reductive scientism that so troubled phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and others in the early 20th century, lead Hesse---as it did me---to the possibilities of the tale as one of the ancestral forms of fiction that free writers and readers from the constraints of a naive naturalism (Faith, for example, is told as a black American folk tale), a form that permits greater exploration of spiritual questions. (See The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse, trans. by Jack Zipes, Bantam Books, 1995.)

Thus at the end of Magister Ludi (aka "The Glass Bead Game"), which locked down Hesse's Noble prize for literature, we find poems and stories supposedly written by that novel's protagonist. One final, longish story, "The Indian Life," was inspired by a Hindu legend. Since I figured Hesse did not own that legend, I wrote my own version of it in "The Gift of the Osuo."

I could go on and on with these deliberate comparisons: for example, an existentialist speech by Chaym Smith in Chapter Five of Dreamer that echoes one in Demian; or one by the character Wendy Barnes in my story "Alethia" that is indebted to Hesse. But I've always been content to let literary scholars make these discoveries on their own. And if they don't? Well, that's OK, too.

ELLISON: STILL VISIBLE AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

RALPH ELLISON

  Let me talk a little bit about Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

Sometimes I feel I know this book as well as I do my own work. I've been reading and teaching and writing about it since the late 1960s. Last year Intiman theater in Seattle was planning on having me adapt it for the stage. So I spent all of May, 2010 and part of June once again taking that novel apart page by page (I also did that in 1978 when WGBH in Boston hoped to adapt it as a series for PBS), image by image (Ellison, I realized for the first time, had a great affection for doll imagery: automatons that represented life lived inauthentically or artificially), scene by scene (it is a very violent story, with seven fight scenes plus a Harlem riot at the end), speech by speech, then putting it back together as a play (3 acts, 19 scenes). In addition to doing a 20-page, single-spaced Scene Outline and Synopsis, I also wrote with the help of dramaturge Marvin McAlister a 10-page, single-spaced outline for just the director, focusing on physical and psychological actions for all the characters in each scene. Unfortunately, Intiman theater lost the rights to do this novel as a stage adaptation, and because of financial problems recently canceled the rest of its season for 2011. A stage adaptation for the novel---or at least a workshop for a production that must be approved by trustees of the Ellison estate---will apparently be done now by Classic Theater of Harlem.

Clearly, Invisible Man is a segregation-era novel, but one that is distinguished from other fiction by black authors in the first half of the 20th century by its muscular exploration of ideas. Ellison himself in an interview some years after its publication expressed the feeling that it became socially and politically "dated" after the Civil Rights Movement swept away the experiential world of Jim Crow in which it is set. I can only agree with the author's assessment of his own work. But I don't think the adventurous engagement with perennially important questions in the novel has been tarnished by time. For more than 50 years Invisible Man has had a powerful influence on three generations of American writers and readers. Its place and importance in the canon of American literature is, like that of equally classic novels by Mark Twain and William Faulkner, secure.

But should it be the standard by which we measure black American writing in 2011?  My answer is, no. And, yes. (Pardon me for being dialectical, and giving an answer that "boomerangs," as Ellison would say.) I would not tell writers today that they should embrace Ellison's Invisible Man as the only standard for literary excellence in black letters. But they would do well to embrace the underlying vision that inspirits his reflections on the demanding enterprise we call serious literature, especially when he says, "The thing that Americans have to learn over and over again is that they are individuals and have the responsibility of individual vision."

          

CONSTRUCTING FICTION: THE WRITING OF "DR.KING'S REFRIGERATOR."

My stories are often the result of the serendipity that occurs when several ideas are brought together in a thought-experiment. I know from much personal experience that I always need at least three good ideas in order for me to conceive, then execute a story---one potentially fertile idea at the beginning for the premise or conflict or what John Barth once called the "ground situation"; a second good idea in the middle that develops or complicates the conflict, often taking it in unexpected directions that surprise me; and, lastly, a good idea that arises in either Act One or Two that at last brings the story to rest.

 

 

An example of this kind of serendipitous discovery is "Dr. King's Refrigerator," one of my most reprinted stories. It was composed in 2002 for Humanities Washington's annual "Bedtime Stories" fund-raiser. The idea given to those of us who wrote a new story for the event that year was "a midnight snack."

 

 

I started writing the story---about 300 words---clumsily and uncertainly, having only a vague idea about a man awakening hungry at midnight. But who was this man? What was his biography or background? I didn't have answers for those questions (in fact, I didn't even have a "story" yet) so I decided to go to bed and start the story over again from scratch the next day.

 

 

On the second day I decided to take a phenomenological step back from the theme or prompt of "a midnight snack" by bracketing or setting aside my own assumptions and presuppositions about the subject. I wanted to regain what Buddhists call "Beginners Mind," with my cup (mind) emptied of what I thought I knew about food. I wanted an attitude of innocence.  I asked myself, "What is a snack?" Well, obviously, it's food. But what is food? On my bookshelf I have a  memento from my childhood, a complete set of The World Book Encyclopedia from 1956, which my parents bought for me. I grew up with them and as a kid I could lose myself for hours reading the entries. So I pulled from the bookshelf the volume marked "F," and began reading its ten pages on Food as Trade, Transportation of Food, Food Through the Ages, Religion and Food, etc. And what struck me more powerfully than anything else was how a meditation on food forced one to see the interconnectness of all life, and what Buddhists call dependent origination or pratitya samputpada.

 

 

So now I had a fresh perception of "food." But who would be the story's protagonist having such a perception? Suddenly, I knew. After more than a decade of immersing myself in studying Martin Luther King Jr., who believed that all life was "a network of mutuality," with all beings "tied in a single garment of destiny," I realized he was the perfect candidate for this. But not when he was a world-historical figure changing America during his 14 years as the nation's preacher and gadfly of the state. Rather, I saw him earlier in life, exactly a year before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat, when he and his wife Coretta were newly married, and he was still a Ph.D. candidate, ABD (all but dissertation) and trying to make a good impression on his first job at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

 

MARTIN AND CORETTA

 

 

When the story opens he is enveloped by what one of my students once called a quotidian "chronic tension"---that unfinished dissertation and weekly sermons to write, a strangulation-tight schedule, and a nagging sense of guilt that his work is keeping him away from his wife (the conflict or story's first good idea). The second good idea is his epiphany about food when he opens his refrigerator. And the third arises at the story's end, which turns way from a meditation on the metaphysics of food to a more tender moment when the protagonist prioritizes his wife over his work.

 

 

All in all, this is one of the "quietest" (and for me most satisfying) philosophical fictions that I've published, one that offers an imagined version of King before he became internationally famous, politically powerful, and found himself at the white-hot center of America's racial agonies, which is the way he is portrayed in my novel Dreamer. Why do I like this story so much? Well, for the same reason I've always admired James Joyce's "The Dead" and Gabriel Conroy's revelation about his wife Gretta. Profound, perception-altering epiphanies that forever change our lives happen not exclusively during big public events recorded by the world's cameras, like the electrifying Birmingham campaign, but also and perhaps most often in the quieter, private spaces we move through---a Dublin hotel room, say, or a kitchen in Montgomery, Alabama at midnight.

CHARLES JOHNSON TALKS ABOUT THE E-CHANNEL

I'm trying to make sure with my answers that I provide information and details not present in the 6 critical books literary scholars have published about my work, or in the book of interviews that Jim McWilliams published.

          
For me, this has been---and still is---a great, rare opportunity to get "said" some things never said before, to set the record straight and clear up any misconceptions. In NYC, Nathaniel Nesmith gave to his students the post on "Progress in Literature" (I spoke with his students last Friday on Skype). So these posts are useful, not just for literary scholars, but also for students. Others have given to their students the "Craft and Revision" post.


I think you've started something original here that has potential. One of my agents says she enjoys seeing them every day when she gets up,  because she's never before had this kind of look into a writer's life and thought. I know others must feel that way. Literary scholar Robert Abrams also told me that he enjoys them, especially the one on dogs.

If you line up people in future years to do this, I think you'll create a great deal of excitement. A historian. A poet. A film-maker. An actor. The sky is the limit. But you might want to get someone who is an old man like me with a lifetime of experience in his or her field. Can you imagine the kinds of questions you might ask Albert Murray? Or bell hooks? Or Jan Willis? Or an older black actor? 

They could open up cultural history for readers. But they need to be people who can write and deliver copy---a brief essay---fast. I don't think this is the kind of feature where someone should labor on their prose as they would a novel, story or essay. That's why I said in a recent post that these brief essays are as close as I get to releasing first-draft material. You need to select people who are motor-mouths. Conversationalists. Talky and chatty. But---and here's one last point---the answers people give shouldn't be like diary entries. The answers should clarify some subject. 

You'll notice how I try often to refer readers to books that relate to the subject of the question I'm trying to answer. I quote from others as often as I can. I DO ground many pieces in my biography, something that happened to me, but I always try to nudge the autobiographical into a larger cultural or philosophical context so the answer isn't just about me since that wouldn't, in my opinion, serve the greater good.

THE REAL FAITH AND THE GOOD THING

I will praise thee for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Psalms 139:14

 I'm a practicing Buddhist, but I grew up as an only child in a quietly pious Christian home and within the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest independent denomination among black churches, founded in 1816 by Rev. Richard Allen in Philadelphia. Faith was simply part of the fibre of our black American lives in the 1950s. The central lived "locations" of my early childhood were three: home, where I had loving, supportive, and unselfish parents; Ebenezer A.M.E. Church, where I embraced a religion that was two millennia old and shaped every aspect of Western civilization; and Noyes Elementary School, where the teachers in that integrated institution were first-rate, as they would be when I went to Evanston Township High School (it was often rated in the 1960s as the #1 public high school in America.) All three of these places were within short walking distance, and symbiotically nurtured each other.

Naturally, home was the foundation, a location my parents made a fun place to be, especially my Mom because she aspired to be a teacher and had an artistic sensibility (and sometimes taught Sunday school.) The black church provided a clear moral and spiritual vision as well as a community of people with shared values. And the school offered exciting knowledge about the wider world. This basic triad was essential for forming my values in the 1950s and a major influence on my future as a liberal humanist. No one point on this triad could adequately do all the work of the others. All three working together were necessary. I believe that if one of those elements in the triad had been removed, my early life would have been poorer for that, and less complete.

  

Never a night passed when I did not see my father, a strong black man who loved black people, on his knees in prayer before bedtime. (And my own kids can say that about me.) He was reliable, solid as a rock, a guru (the Sanskrit word means "too heavy to be moved"). When he died at age 81, he had five preachers at his funeral in rural South Carolina, and what one said in his eulogy let me know he knew my father very well. He said Dad was never in the choir, nor did he volunteer to be a deacon or on different committees. But he was there every Sunday (and apologized to the pastor if for some reason he couldn't make it), smiling as he absorbed the sermons and loving it when the choir sang. (Some of my southern relatives have their own traveling gospel group and sell CDs of their work.) This pastor said my Dad never talked scripture or spoke of his faith. It was simply an integral part of his life. He'd work three jobs a week sometimes, but I remember that he told his white employers that he'd never work on Sunday because, as he put it, "Sunday was for church."

Given this background, I can confess---now that I'm retired----that my movement through the secular (and often anti-religious) academic and art worlds was sometimes less than easy. Indeed, sometimes it was downright hard, spiritually. I kept my liberal Christian background to myself when in college during the late 1960s, and during my 33 years in higher education (I do wear a cross, and once one of my now successful students, novelist Gary Hawkes, said to me after class, "That must be awfully heavy around your neck"). For me, there was always a moral "bright line" that I was conditioned not to cross, so often in the art and academic worlds I felt "in it but not of it." I'm sure my easy relationship with John Gardner had something to do with his being, as one critic put it, "shyly Christian." 

My being a Buddhist was always much more "acceptable" in academic and artistic circles, especially to atheists, because that spiritual path makes no reference to God, and for that reason was originally classified as a "philosophy" not a religion by Christians when they first encountered it. (I think this initial Western classification has much truth to it.) Inwardly, I've always cringed whenever I found myself in the company of people who dump on or trash Christianity, and I've promised myself these days to politely---or maybe not so politely---leave the room whenever that kind of myopic intolerance rears its head. (Yet in my youth I often found myself arguing passionately, angrily, with dogmatic, fundamentalist Christians---who get on my last nerve---because they were dismissive of science and philosophy.) I probably pray silently a hundred times a day. When I tell a sick or suffering friend or former student that they will be in my prayers and meditations, I mean it. They will be in them that night.

So, like Dr. Jan Willis, who calls herself a "Baptist/Buddhist," and Thich Nhat Hahn, who has an image of Jesus on his meditation shrine in France and authored the best-selling book Living Buddha, Living Christ, I'm really a product of two spiritual traditions, and I would never deny or reject my past. In Asia, you'll find quite a bit of spiritual blendings of this kind. And, of course, Buddhists are ontologically non-dualistic, and believe in the interdependence of all things.

PROGRESS IN LITERATURE

"One can no longer write African-American literature, any more than one can currently write Elizabethan literature." Kenneth W. Warren.

  

"Progress in Literature" was an article I was commissioned to write for a book entitled Making Progress: Essays in Progress and Public Policy, edited by C. Leigh Anderson and Janet W. Looney (Lexington Books, 2002). It is reprinted in Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing (Scribner, 2003).

  

In that work I argue that technical and thematic progress in literature can easily be demonstrated if we trace, for example, the English novel from the 18th century work of Samuel Richardson and Daniel Defoe through later practitioners of the form such as Fielding, Sterne, and 20th century writers like Faulkner and Hemingway. The same evolution can be demonstrated for the modern short story, beginning with Poe's almost single-handed creation of the form, and tracing it through a period of formulaic writing circa 1900 to the revolt against that formalism in the work of such writers as D.H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter, James Joyce, Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor, and others. 

There is no question that in terms of craft we are better writers today than most of our predecessors, and much credit for this progress must be given to the more than 300 writing programs that have sprung up since the end of World War II; and to writers themselves becoming teachers while at the same time democratizing and de-mystifying the creative process as it pertains to literary fiction. 

But Ethelbert has asked me to tailor this question specifically to black American literature, a request that should allow me to refine and expand a bit upon "Progress in Literature."

  

Every teacher (or student) of black American literature discovers very early that this body of work was created largely during the periods of slavery and segregation. That is the ground from which so much of it---slave narratives, protest novels---arises. And how could it be otherwise? In What is Literature?, when Sartre discusses Richard Wright in the 1940s, he says, "if an American Negro finds that he has a vocation as a writer, he discovers his subject at the same time. He is the man who sees the whites from outside, who assimilates the white culture from the outside, and each of whose books will show the alienation of the black race within American society."     

The protest novel, as Sartre indicates, was understandably taken to be the form sine qua non for black writing. Famous debates raged over this issue, leading to classic essays like James Baldwin's "Everybody's Protest Novel," and Ralph Ellison's "The World and the Jug." Both those black authors (and many others) wished to move beyond the narrow constraints placed upon black writing in the segregation era, although this was the sort of black novel liberal or progressive white readers were most interested in seeing from black authors: the kind, as Sartre says, that "gives society a guilty conscience; he (the black writer) is thereby in a state of perpetual antagonism toward the conservative forces which are maintaining the balance he needs to upset."

But, as I argued in a recent, widely-read essay, "The End of the Black American

Narrative" (The American Scholar, Summer 2008), we are now over 40 years into the post-Civil Rights period. Has black American literature changed? Has it "progressed" in terms of reflecting the new 21st century realities and experiences of black Americans?

Without mentioning my essay, Kenneth W. Warren, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, published a piece entitled "Does African-American Literature Exist?" in the February 24, 2011 issue of The Chronicle Review. He explained that his aim was to "make a claim that runs counter to much of literary scholarship." His claim is this:

"African-American literature was the literature of a distinct historical period, namely the era of constitutionally sanctioned segregation known as Jim Crow...Like it or not, African-American literature was a Jim Crow phenomenon, which is to say, speaking from the standpoint of a post-Jim Crow world, African-American literature is history. While one can (and students of American literature certainly should) write about African-American literature, one can no longer write African-American literature, any more than one can currently write Elizabethan literature."

Warren also points out that, "Writing in 1942 in the short-lived journal Negro Quarterly: A Review of Negro Life and Culture, edited by Angelo Herndon and Ralph Ellison, for example, the upstart young black critic Edward Bland lamented the lack of literary accomplishment among Harlem Renaissance authors in the 1920s: 'One of the outstanding features of the Negro novels that appeared during the twenties was their literary incompetence'."

Obviously, that complaint about techne and craft has been finally put to rest by a very large number of award-winning black authors who are master craftsmen and craftswomen. But the larger issue raised by Warren remains: Is there "progress" in the content of black literary fiction? And, more to point, is it even possible to write "black" literature anymore? As Warren says, "Sever that connection (to slavery and Jim Crow), and works, however accomplished, would settle into the literary universe according to style, theme, genre, or whatever."

 In other words, "black" literature in the early 21st century, the era of President Barack Obama, America's first black president, can be said to have progressed to the stage of being seen now as simply human literature. It was that before, of course, but today it is neither limited to the protest novel, nor does it bear the burden of having to somehow represent and speak for the experiences of an entire people in their liberation struggle. Do John Updike, Stephen King, John Gardner, or Joyce Carol Oates speak for all white people? Obviously not. Nor can it be said today that John Edgar Wideman, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Terry McMillan, Charles Johnson, Walter Mosley or any black writer working in 2011 speaks in an all-inclusive, exhaustive way about the so-called "black experience" which, as writer Reginald McKnight once put it, is "as polymorphous as the dance of Shiva."

All American writers, then, can only be be approached today in terms of their individual voices and visions. And the quality of their literary and intellectual performances. That is the basis on which each will be experienced and judged. And isn't that the dangerous freedom---the progress---that writers during the Harlem Renaissance dreamed of having?

       

BLACKS AND BUDDHISM/ BUDDHISM AND BLACKS

When some Americans are in the presence of a person who is black and Buddhist, you can see the cognitive dissonance---the confusion--right there in their eyes as they struggle to process this information that so rudely unsettles their cultural and racial presuppositions. 

Over forty years I've seen people react to this phenomenon with emotions that range from fear to anger, as if they had somehow been personally betrayed, insulted or threatened; and I've seen others who know something about Buddhism delight in this revelation, as if to say, And why not? But just as James Weldon Johnson stated in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man that, "I believe it is a fact that the colored people in this country know and understand the white people better than the white people understand them," so too, I have to say that the vast majority of Americans are very poorly informed about the theory and practice of Buddhism.

Over 2600 years, many branches or traditions of Buddhism have sprung from the bodhi tree. One of these that is especially attractive to black American Buddhists is Soka Gakkai (Nichiren), which claims to have approximately 15,000 black practitioners, among them Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson, Tina Turner, and the jazz great Herbie Hancock. My sister-in-law in Chicago is a practitioner of this school that also attracts a large number of Hispanics. Unlike other Buddhist traditions, Soka Gakkai is proactive and proselytizes, seeking out members in urban areas with large black populations (practitioners urge their friends to join)---this is very different from the image most convert American Buddhists have of Japanese Zen traditions where, for example, stories are told of a spiritual seeker made to sit for a full day or two outside a zendo before he is finally admitted, and then only at first as a visitor. (In other words, you need to show that you really need and want this.)

Soka Gakkai members chant chapters from the Lotus Sutra, and if you have ever been lucky enough to be in a room where they are chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo in unison you will experience anew the elemental power of sound as their collective voices move like a strong, cleansing wind or an ocean wave through every cell and fibre of your body. Although I tilt toward the Theravada tradition, and took a lay person's formal vows in the Japanese Soto Zen tradition founded by Dogen, I have a deep appreciation for the way Herbie Hancock described his practice in a 2007 interview for Beliefnet:

 "The idea of cause and affect, which Nam-myoho-renge-kyo is about, made sense to me," he said. "I'm a guy that's always been attracted to science---and cause and effect is what science is about...The cool thing is that jazz is really a wonderful example of the great characteristics of Buddhism and the great characteristics of the human spirit. Because in jazz we share, we listen to each other, we respect each other, we are creating in the moment. At our best we're non-judgmental. If we let judgment get in the way of improvising, it always screws us up. So we take whatever happens and try to make it work...At the same time---and just think about this---within the life of a human being is the universe. So, we all have the universe inside at our core."

HERBIE HANCOCK

Those words don't sound as if they are coming from a person who sees himself as a "victim," do they? Such a conceptualization poisons the mind and the human spirit. Mr. Hancock, like all Buddhists, is not mired in a past that cannot be recovered or a future that will never come, but instead works to anchor himself "in the moment." And he is not ensnared in what black Buddhist teacher Lama Rangdrol describes as the debilitation, bitter, polarized and cliched "mentality of an angry black man." Added to that, Hancock's comparison of his egoless listening and non-judgmental approach as a jazz musician to the Dharma reminds us that Buddhist practice has much in common with the process we associate with creating art, which demands an openness to all things. (Buddhism, some commentators have pointed out, is a form of artistic practice with your life itself being the material you are shaping.)

What unites black Buddhists, regardless of the tradition they belong to, is the desire to be free. Truly free. The practice of Buddhism is the practice of life itself. Last week I had the great pleasure of reading, then endorsing a book entitled Tell Me Something about Buddhism: Questions and Answers for the Curious Beginner, by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, a black Soto Zen Priest. 

ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL

Her book, which includes a foreword by Thich Nhat Hahn, will be published in October by Hampton Roads. In the future when anyone asks me questions about black people and Buddhism, I plan to simply tell them to buy Zenju's beautiful book. She is acutely aware of how we can be enslaved by the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. By the concepts and words that obscure our experience of reality. Just reading her clear, beautiful and inspiring answers to questions about Buddhist practice quiets and calms the mind as quickly as the wood striking wood sound of a han calling us to awakening. (In Japanese Soto Zen a han is a mallet and piece of wood that are struck to summon practitioners to the zendo). Each page is rich in wisdom, as when one of her teachers points out that, "All emotions are from the past."

  

Meditate for just a moment on that.