THE AGE OF WAITING

by Douglas J. Penick

Douglas Penick’s THE AGE OF WAITING presents inner landscapes emerging in the juncture of our chaotic past and our incomprehensible future. It is a search through personal memoirs, reflections, histories, poems and episodes from Buddhist and other cultures. The process of reading here is a kind of wandering, encountering uncertainties, stillness and unanticipated vistas. This is a book in which to discover new connections and new inner possibilities.

181 pages, Paperback

Published December 5, 2020

About the author

For a long time, I’ve been committed to work that might help renew a culture of inwardness, particularly in reflecting on the relationship between society and nature. To this end, I worked on Emilio Ambasz’ visionary Universitas Project at MOMA in NY (which explored new alignments within the forces capable of re-designing the man-made environment). I then withdrew from that arena to study, practice and later teach Buddhism in the Karma Kagyu/Nyingma traditions. After twenty years, this evolved into making, with composer, Peter Lieberson, new pieces invoking various Central Asian epic traditions of spiritual and cultural renewal. The results were: King Gesar, premiered at the Munich Biennale (Sony CD), and Ashoka’s Dream about the Emperor Ashoka at the Santa Fe Opera. I’ve worked at presenting the nexus of loss and re-birth in a number of written and theater pieces centering on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (a series for the National Film Board of Canada -Leonard Cohen,Narrator), a piece at the Asia Society with Music by Philip Glass and a later one with Butoh master, Katsura Kan).

I then wrote two novels: A Journey of The North Star, an account, told by a eunuch-slave, of the third Ming Emperor’s struggle to re-create traditional Chinese culture (Publerati in 2012), and Dreamers and Their Shadows, about a revolutionary spiritual teacher, his erratic students, and their strange if lingering fate (2013-Mountain Treasury Press). In 2015, Hammer and Anvil Press published From The Empire of Fragments, a collection focused on the lives of the culturally displaced. This spring, Wakefield Press will bring out Charles Ré and my translation of Pascal Quignard’s A Terrace in Rome.

Shorter work has appeared in Cahiers de L’Herne, Agni, Chicago Quarterly, New England Quarterly, Parabola, Tricycle and Kyoto Journal among many others .

Reviews

[RiversideReader]

Thank you Arrowsmith Press for this wonderful book. A bit of a mix-up in shipping but I feel it reached me exactly when it was meant to. Douglas Penick begins this book with a cancer scare that changes his life experience. He is in his seventies and was a student of Chogyuam Trungpa Rinpoche. Many of the essays in this book have appeared previously in Tricycle and Shambhala Sun Magazines. They are excellent. Mr. Penick addresses fear and aging concerns in a very accessible and meaningful way for me.
The early life of the Buddha is here. The Four Noble Truths are presented quite clearly. Short biographies of Buddhist sages from the not too distant past are also included.
Examples from the authors life and that of his friends and family tie all these teachings together most profoundly and poetically. I have underlined quite a few passages that held deep meaning for me.
This book is so relevant in our times now with more than 500,000 lives lost to Covid in the US. I highly recommend The Age of Waiting.

[Bryan Spellman]

Full disclosure: I received this book as part of Librarything's Early Reviewer program. At first, I had trouble deciding if I liked the book. I am not a Buddhist and know very little about Buddhism. Many sections of the book talk of historical figures, and these sections I found fascinating--especially those that dealt with Buddhist communities in Siberia. The philosophical sections of the book are the ones that gave me more trouble. That said, I highly recommend Penick's book to all interested in the history, philosophy and, yes, wisdom of Buddhist teachings.

[John von Daler]

Think of kaleidoscopes, readable ones:
a flow from poetry to personal history
to ancient fables. These are age-old topics,
renewed and rethought. Let them wash
over you, dazzle you. Let your mind open.
The Age of Waiting is wonderful, wonderful
writing.