These beautifully crafted essays are by Lin Jensen, a retired teacher and carpenter who, as an adult, took lay ordination as a Soto Zen Buddhist. He is especially drawn to the intuitive practice of the Heartmind, which is "a wisdom comprised of charity, tenderness, benevolence, and sympathy." In the Buddhist pantheon of virtues, intuition holds a high place.
Again and again, Lin Jensen ponders the precariousness of life and the losses that mount up. There is the grief he and his wife feel when they leave behind their home in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and move to Chico in California's Central Valley. There is the bereavement they feel when eleven maples are cut down in their new community. "We will bear the shape of their absence."
Jensen reminisces about the killing shed on his father's farm where turkeys were slain. And in the death of a fawn on a highway, he feels all the anguish of his life — including his father's death — press upon his heart. The wisdom of the Heartmind, as these essays so vividly convey, links us in sympathetic bonds to all living beings. The tenderness and the compassion in these ties make life worth living.