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Editorial Reviews (From Publishers Weekly)
Marine biologist Rudloe, who works and live in the "hidden" Florida panhandle coast, sings the life of a beginning Zen practitioner. From early longings and attractions to Zen, through her first retreat that ends only to find her still face-to-face with her elderly and cantankerous grandmother, to longer retreats and truly sterling insights, Rudloe tracks the path through the elusive Zen forest, detailing the fluctuations of sitting and doing "nothing."
Writing with a haunting, beautiful appreciation of the natural world, particularly of sea and coastal pine forest, Rudloe reveals her maturing depth. Her book has merit for anyone at any stage of the Zen path, for although she is not afraid to reveal her naive in the beginning pages, neither is she shy about showing the evolution of spirit that accrues through practice. Her prose, poetic at times, is always clear. Her best writing marries the elemental world of her work and life to the ephemeral spiritual world that merges and abides in her. At her best describing her connection to nature, Rudloe can also articulate ineffable mysteries with easy grace: "Staring at that silence and stillness long enough, merging with it, we eventually come to realize that the answers to our questions are within that stillness. We don't penetrate the silence, it penetrates and dissolves us."
Book Description
Anne Rudloe was attracted to Zen as a college student. But it seemed premature for a 21-year-old to focus on the difficulties of life when she'd hardly begun to live. Twenty-five years later, she was ready to explore the spiritual discipline that originated in Asian monasteries more than a millennium ago.
Rudloe's quest is compellingly chronicled in Butterflies on a Sea Wind, which combines the rigor of formal monastic Zen practice with the challenges of integrating Zen concepts into modern daily life. Her narrative describes both the physical and mental demands of Zen retreats and how she applied what she learned there to her work as a marine biologist in Florida, as well as to the rigors of raising children and caring for an elderly grandmother.
In words that intimately draw in her readers, she describes how Zen helps us look inward and use the wisdom we find there to reach out to others. Buddhism is one of the fastest growing spiritual traditions in America today. During the 1990s, the number of organized Buddhist centers in this country grew more than 40 percent, from 429 to 1,062. While there are many books about Zen on the market today, few give a clear picture of what it's like to actually sit down and begin a meditation practice and then apply it to a daily life. Likewise, few books discuss the types of issues most people face every day: raising a family and earning a living. Butterflies on a Sea Wind does all this and more.
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Details
Paperback: 192 pages
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing (August 2, 2002)
Language: English
Reader¡¯s Review
You can feel the author's struggles, October 25, 2002
Reviewer: Mark Meyer (Kenmore, NY USA)
What a wonderful, gentle book! I thought this was a superb example of "living Zen," the kind of Zen book that is half didactic and half personal autobiography. Anne Rudloe invites us into her home to see her struggle with her 90-year-old, cranky grandmother and her sons (named Cypress and Sky). I thought Ms. Rudloe did a superb job of showing us how difficult it is to apply Zen practice when our nearest and dearest drive us insane. But her moments with her sons outdoors watching deer or the stars or the sunset were magical. I thought the pivotal center point of the book was on p. 80 where she describes having just listened to "Stars and Stripes Forever" with her boys while watching a heron. She concludes: "In that moonlight, in that moment, Zen, the finger that points to the moon, was nonexistent." Wow.
