Zen Buddhist teacher & author Shodo Spring will join us to discuss her new book, which opens practical possibilities for creating a shared, flexible culture that knows the natural world both as family and as a working partner.

Only modern humans have imagined ourselves as gods… And come to the edge of destroying life on earth.

Open Reality speaks to the world behind and beneath our daily collective trauma. It opens practical possibilities for creating a shared, flexible culture that knows the natural world both as family and as a working partner. It invites the reader to a world of possibility. What if industrial civilization isn’t the best that humans can do? What if we weren’t alone in the world, but embedded in a universe of conscious, intentional, powerful beings?

Shodo Spring has belonged to the natural world for as long as she can remember. She studied physics hoping to understand the universe, then psychotherapy to understand humans, then Buddhism to free herself, all while voraciously reading in history, anthropology, archaeology, political science, philosophy, and spirituality. She joined a series of political movements, finally focused on environment and environmental justice, what would be called deep ecology. Along the way Shodo started one of the first battered women’s shelters, worked as a community organizer in inner-city Cleveland, trained to become a psychotherapist, and explored spirituality including Sufism, Dianic witchcraft, and shamanism, practiced nonviolent social change, and finally entered the practice of Zen Buddhism, which unlocked her internal cage. Shodo’s written work includes Take Up Your Life: Making Spirituality Work in the Real World (Tuttle, 1996), editing Shohaku Okumura’s The Mountains and Waters Sutra: A Practitioners Guide to Dogen’s “Sansuikyo” (Wisdom, 2018), numerous essays in anthologies, and an ongoing monthly blog.

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