Zen teacher Karen Maezen Miller is beloved for helping her readers and students understand that the insight and contentment they think of as "out there" are really here and now. Miller and her husband's rocky road to a home with a venerable Japanese garden demonstrates how fear, anxiety, and doubt blind us. The process of transforming both a garden and a marriage shows the benefits of grappling with the hands-on, day-in-and-day-out needs of "the ground where you stand."
Each chapter explores a Zen koan or quotation, and while Miller's teachings are warmly personal, they are also gently, insistently pragmatic. In homage to her departed teacher, Taizan Maezumi Roshi, who once gardened the ground Miller now cultivates, Miller's down-to-earth insights are as simple as planting a seed and as profound as nurturing perennial mindfulness.
