Published on Amazon as an eBook and as a paper copy on Etsy: Lagana's story:
I went to Thailand to be a Buddhist nun in 1969. A restless American college girl, I left the nunnery after a year, then fell in love with a Thai farm community on a canal and with an amazing son of that land. Life in the Thai culture and nature melted my perceptions of self and reality: common actions or words carried surprising differences; lack of roads and electricity made life easier, and Thai farmers, agile like gymnasts, had freedoms and skills modern life has lost. Their simple living was the Thai King’s “Philosophy of Sufficiency Economy.”
My life’s journey into another culture, into love and loss, into Zen meditation and joyful silence, was toward my Thai husband’s knowledge of the heart. My story is a tragic-comedy of traveling the surface of the land, my body, my life, living in my thoughts and assumptions, until life knocked me into the present – into a listening born of nature, led by my Buddhist teachers, by Thai farm elders and my husband (and professional diplomats). Then came the destruction of that life and nature. Illustrated by my photos of the Thai canal lands and my linoleum prints. Please give feedback/corrections for my next step: finding a major publisher.
My journey into Buddhism,
into another culture,
into love and loss,
Into death and silence,
opened many questions.
A journey where language,
events, fellow travelers,
the path itself,
don’t show what
or why they are,
or where they’re leading
for pages, for years.
And questions
opened more questions
that led me,
not to answers in words,
but to Aroon’s listening . . .
into Aroon’s
knowledge of the heart.
.
Available as an eBook, it is available on Amazon. Or buy Lagana's Japanese bound hardback with wood covers shown below on LaganaDesign at Etsy.com Contact Lagana on the blog here or go to Etsy/laganadesign and send a message. All of the illustrations in The Last Real Death are available as digital prints, and some of the originals are still for sale.
The Roots of Life, The Trees of Love
my life’s poems about adjusting to another culture, about the Thai canal life, the beauty of our land and laments for its loss, illustrated with my linoleum block and serigraph prints. Also love songs, dramas of family dynamics, what we learn from life and what we didn’t, and what my decades of practicing Zen self-awareness has shown me of philosophy, psychology, spirituality, and modern society . . . and time consuming modern houses. From satire and silly comedy, short almost limericks -- to serious, almost epics. For sale as an e-book on Amazon, or the coil-bound copy shown below. Though the next hard-copy will have the Japanese sewn binding as above.
Please give feedback and corrections for the next step: finding a major publisher. The coil-bound copy is for sale as an
Frost Update
Sure. . .
Ice will suffice. . . .
Hate’s a viable vice,
That will ever entice.
And our consuming desires
Start promising fires,
But for annihilation,
Consider asphyxiation,
In case our stuff
Is already enough.
.
Life Is Desire . . .
That this ponderous mud of time
Melt into fire,
A tightening wire
We dance across
Green valleys
And vast lakes.
Life is desire,
A wish of lovers
Who walk a beach
And share a kiss.
Life is a cry
Between the heartbeats in the dark
That we are neither ponderous and slow,
Nor swift and dross,
But eyes of light
And that we fly.
Life is the cry
Of birth and rebirth
Upon the beach,
A pulse of fire.
Life is desire.
Death . . .
Is the screaming silence
That lurks behind each thought,
The
Never seeing,
Never knowing
Cry.
Death is the winking change
In every wonder,
Each birth,
Each love,
Each pulsing sigh.
Death is the mind's black hole,
That passage through which
Each comfort,
Creativity,
And we, ourselves must fly.
