Description

For readers of The Wild Edge of Sorrow and Crying in HMarta profound and searching memoir of life loss grief and renewal from one of American Buddhisms most vital new voices
How do we grieve our losses How can we care for our spirits one long listening offers enduring companionship to all who ask these searing timeless questions
Immigrant daughter novice chaplain bereaved friend author Chenxing Han Be the Refuge takes us on a pilgrimage through the wilds of grief and laughter pain and impermanence reconnecting us to both the heartache and inexplicable brightness of being human
Eddying around three autumns of Hans life one long listening journeys from a mountaintop monastery in Taiwan to West Coast oncology wards from oceanside Ireland to riverfront Phnom Penh Through letters to a dying friend bedside chaplaincy visits and memories of a migratory childhood Hans startling searching memoir cuts a singular portrait of a spiritual caregiver in training
Just as we touch the depths bracing for resolution Hans swift multilingual prose sweeps us back to unknowingness Not knowing is most intimate Chinese mothers hillside graves A dreamed olive tree a lost Siberian crane The music of scripts and silence These shardsbright broken giddy achingare mirrors to our own lives in joy and sorrow
A testament to enduring connection by a fresh and urgent new literary voice one long listening asks fearlessly into the stories we inhabit the hopes we relinquish and what it means simply to be to and for the ones we love