Zen Bouquets Paperback – March 15, 2025

Poetry is the exquisite expression of the heart. Through its art, we can taste andexperience with pure, succinct simplicity what is unknowable -- the mystical, spiritual, andessential. Through its spacious utterance, we sing great romantic songs, muse underthe silvery moonlight, and trace our mutual beginning. Its silence and wisdom can revealthe eternity that ‘I am’ beyond death and the unity that we are one another.Sylvia’s poetry allows us to embrace, touch, rub like lavender, and release the fragrancethat we always have, of who we always are, our essence, and share with the world.As a Zen teacher, Sylvia listens to her sangha, the Ocean Mountain Zen Village(OMZ Village,) with her loving ears and writes inspiring poems to inspire her meditationgroup, during their difficult times.These poems often borrow lines from aZen koan or two — playfully reminding the readerthat these words carry the wisdom, insight, and compassion of a long and deep tradition ofChinese and Japanese Zen Buddhism. In one of her poems, she beckons us to see withnew eyes:Amid your darkness in despair,depression, sickness, and sorrow,you are forever in essence,holy, whole, and magnificent.There is uncertainty in life, butout of courage find a way out, andallow life to live in you withgratitude, joy, and love.With awareness be in here and now.In your wholeness, there is nothing more to earn,to attain, or to receive butto remember, and to nurture your luminosity.The poems are guideposts to deeper insights -- from life’s unavoidable darkness anddespair to a remembrance of our inherent luminosity.At the end of our exploration,we return home, awakened in our spaciousness.Our search is but the universal yearning andprocess of letting go the myth of a personal self,to allow all things to capture us asone vast existence and one love.We intuit and recognize that our pristine,eternal luminosity is magnificent,birthless, and deathless. Sylvi's poetry is full of hope and fearlessness to face life and death of the body.At the end of our journey, we awaken to the reality that we are essence and spirit --magnificent, birthless, and deathless. Read more