Sublime

Rinzai Roku (a celebrated Zen text of the T’ang dynasty) and the teachings of Bankei, the seventeenth-century Japanese master who, for me, represents Zen at its best.

The poet, Gary Snyder, once wrote that we should each aim to “get famous within five miles.” Do not aim to have your name appear in Google searches, but to be known in houses up and down your street. Meet the neighbors, help fix that fence, go to community meetings, and wave at people in the street.

one must look beyond Alaska, to the bald-rock canyons of southern Utah. There, in 1934, a peculiar twenty-year-old boy walked into the desert and never came out. His name was Everett Ruess.

We have lived; our moments are important. This is what it is to be a writer: to be the carrier of details that make up history, to care about the orange booths in the coffee shop in Owatonna.