Steve Abhaya (Brooks) – Poetry Prose & Art

Fearless in Lucknow is the story of an intimate meeting with an esteemed guru, in the least personal reality one can imagine.

“In the first day I spent with Papaji, listening, I saw something I’d never seen before. I saw a man, not only speaking to others about the truth of their inherent nature, I saw being speaking to being, not merely someone speaking about being to others. I saw a man speaking to the people in the big, open room of a suburban house, in a large urban city, on the other side of the world, sometimes speaking as one person to another, and I saw a new thing I hadn’t seen before, I saw love pouring out toward itself, and I heard the clearest, simplest, most direct comprehension of what is beyond understanding, what is beyond the traditional forms of religion and philosophy.” 

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Fearless in Lucknow

In 2003, I went back home to Illinois to care for my mother in her last year of life. She was 89. My brother had been with her for the previous two years. He took over, again, after six months, and was with her in the last four months of her life. In crucial ways, she was a more  significant figure than our father, who died ten years before. Mother is the day to day account of elder care and how it affected and didn’t affect my life as a son, a brother, an artist, and one living in awareness of the illusion of all relationships. 

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Mother

Dear Nadja is autobiographical writing, from 1982, a kind of journalese, that became Borderwalker, seven years later.

“Dear Nadja was written as letters to my sister, Nadja, who doesn’t exist and never did, but when I thought of killing her off, there were those who demanded I not do that. She’s as real as the narrator, who lived  another kind of life, a long time ago.”

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Dear Nadja/original

Dear Nadja

SWIMMING is a coming of age novelization of autobiographical stories, written in 1989.

“These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies – captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose from among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson) 

“Since my past is a familiar life story, like a novel, it seems more true to tell my story as a novelistic autobiography rather than an autobiographical novel. Nathan Axene and I share identical histories, but we are not the same. His life is in this book. Mine is in this moment. You could say that this is a personal true story, or you could say it’s fiction, and both are true. By telling my life story as if it’s about someone else, I can tell both kinds of truth, the literal and the literary, the true story of Nathan Axene, my friend, the predecessor of who I appear to be.” 

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SWIMMING