Circle of the Way
By Ken Arnold
188 pages
$18.00
Finalist in Spirituality, 2008 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.
Following a diagnosis of prostate cancer in 2004, Ken Arnold chronicles his recovery in a Japanese literary form known as haibun, compact personal narratives containing haiku. Through journeys into his past, to Kyoto, Japan, and out of an emotional collapse, he maps the spiritual landscape of his illnesses. Circle of the Way is a moving story of recovering wellness and discovering the deeper self.
Japan is at the center of these reflections, both as a place and as an aesthetic. The author's Zen perspective and study of the traditional Japanese bamboo flute, the shakuhachi, echo through the poetry and prose. The three pieces comprising Circle of the Way form the arc of a spiritual journey of discovery. The first, "Digressions: Zen and Cancer," recounts the author's cancer diagnosis and treatment through a series of travels to familiar places of the past and present; "Bamboo Days: A Kyoto Journal," depicts a revelatory immersion in the healing landscape of the Japanese aesthetic; "Kokoro: In the Noguchi Gardens," explores the heart of being (kokoro, in Japanese) through several encounters with Noguchi's massive stone sculptures. The book's individual parts coalesce with an epiphany in the Noguchi Garden in Queens, New York.
Ken Arnold is an award-winning playwright and poet, whose poems have appeared in numerous magazines. As a Eugene O'Neill Fellow in 1979, he developed his play She Also Dances, which was cited in Best Plays of 1983. He is the author of On the Way and Nightfishing in Galilee. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife Connie Kirk.
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