Shunryu Suzuki Roshi founded the San Francisco Zen Center in 1962, and after fifty years we have seen a fine group of Zen masters trained in the west take up the mantle and extend the practice of Zen in ways that might have been hard to imagine in those first early years. Susan Murphy, one of Robert Aitken’s students and dharma heirs, is one of the finest in this group of young Zen teachers. She is also a fine writer, and following on the teaching of her Roshi she has engaged her spiritual work in the ordinary world, dealing with the practice of daily life and with the struggles of all beings.

We know that our earth is in crisis, but is the situation beyond repair? Are we on a path of planetary disaster where the only proper response is to prepare for our melancholic dystopian future? Is there a way out of our suspicious cynicism? In the tradition of Thomas Berry, using this spiritual opportunity to change the very nature of our crisis, Susan Murphy offers a profound message, subtly presented with clarity and assurance, showing that engaged Buddhism provides a possible path to the necessary repair and healing.

So on every level, in every chapter, the intent of this book is to help break free of the old frame that has held us paralyzed and silent in the face of the crisis: by listening to the earth and responding to the koan of this crisis; by looking at the way we heave framed the earth and thus ourselves with the old stories that are still generating the thinking that created the problem; by exploring the implications of an infinitely older story that is now in all our hands, the Universe Story, which is also the story of earth and life; and by exploring a practice of full awareness that can bring our actions back from an alienated state into more full accord with the terms of the earth…

 

At every moment of life, this extraordinary gift bestowed upon us by our magical planet, are we willing to welcome the difficulty as our great chance? Surely we have to live up to this unprecedented moment we are in…

“It’s a hundred times more difficult to find an insight than a fact, and hundred times more difficult to find a subtle insight. This is a book full of subtle insights beautifully told.” —Thomas Moore, author of Dark Nights of the Soul