One Blade of Grass: A Zen Memoir

Description

**A TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR SELECTION** 'Captivating' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'The book Shukman was born to write' NATALIE GOLDBERG, author of WRITING DOWN THE BONES 'A wonderful and generous book' DAVID HINTON, author of THE WILDS OF POETRY 'Heartfelt and beautifully written' STEPHEN BATCHELOR, author of AFTER BUDDHISM *** One Blade of Grass is award-winning novelist and poet Henry Shukman's account of his journey through the world of Zen Buddhism. Raised in a rationalist household in Oxford during the spiritual heyday of the Sixties and Seventies, an unexpected spiritual awakening would prompt a lifelong quest to integrate the experience into his life, leading him eventually to Zen Buddhism. As Shukman gets to grips with meditative practice and struggles with anxiety, depression and the chronic eczema he had had since childhoods, he discovers in surprising ways the emotional, spiritual and even physical healing that he has been searching for all along. By turns humorous and moving, this beautifully written memoir demystifies Zen training, casting its profound insights in simple, lucid language, and takes the reader on a journey of their own, into the hidden treasures of life that contemplative practice can reveal to any of us.

Henry Shukman is an English poet and writer. He is the recipient of the Arvon Poetry Prize, the Jerwood Aldeburgh Poetry Prize, the Arts Council England Writer's Award, the Author's Club First Novel Award, and his poems have appeared in the Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Independent on Sunday. He now teaches mindfulness and meditation in the US and Europe, and is the guiding teacher at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.