Publisher's Synopsis
Silk Road, Iron Bird is a memoir of a month I spent in Kathmandu, in 1999, at the invitation of a new friend. I had never traveled outside the United States. As a beginning practitioner of Buddhism, I leapt at the opportunity to walk where my teachers had walked, to walk where the Buddha himself was said to have walked. I did my best to go without expectations, and in one way I succeeded. Although my conscious mind was hopelessly filled with exotic thoughts of Asia, the rest of me was utterly innocent. I was unprepared for sudden immersion into another culture with its strange smells and fey winds, a culture foreign to me, where "no" might mean "yes," where a smile might be a sign of anger. I did as well as I could have expected ... Silk Road, Iron Bird has been ten years in the writing. Since I had no context in which to cast the experience, the poem itself became the means through which I integrated the journey with the rest of my life. What follows is the latest of countless incarnations ...
