Zen Chaos Writing

Eightfold: Zen Poetry for Blindly Clasping Beings (2025) is a collection of sixty poems that will meet you where you are—muddy, submerged, gasping—and remind you: this is where the lotus grows.

Flowing through the overarching themes of wisdom, action, and focus, and rooted in a layperson’s struggle to find presence in the world, Eightfold explores the raw, human experiences of craving, desire, suffering—and the challenging act of clawing out to balance. Poems include a retelling of the story of Siddhartha’s transformation into the Buddha, modern interpretive dialogues with the Eightfold Path, reflections on how Buddhist concepts shape our lives, our societies, and the planet itself, and commentary on how human nature, the suffering woven into daily life, and the modern challenges we create for ourselves fit into the Zen worldview.

Rather than a picture-perfect guide to enlightenment being spouted from an author behind monastery walls, or a narrative from someone claiming to have reached unceasing nirvana, these poems engage with the Eightfold Path as an in-progress process—a dialogue with secular Buddhist thought that anyone, no matter how floundering you might be, can join in on.

Eightfold: Zen Poetry for Blindly Clasping Beings is, thus, Zen for the rest of us. For the blind, the clasping, and all those ever-reaching for liberation, this is the book you want to bring to your meditation cushion.