Steve Brooks (Abhaya) – Poetry, Prose & Art

Fearless in Lucknow is now available on Kindle, @ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BXK1OVU/

Fearless in Lucknow is the story of an intimate meeting with an esteemed guru, in the least personal reality one can imagine. It is also the story of a poet among seekers.

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 others 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, most direct expression of what is beyond the familiar forms of religion and philosophy – awareness of being itself, and speaking, in and from, that awareness.

“In reading Fearless in Lucknow, I realized that Steve Abhaya is one of the few people I have ever met who truly understands and tries to live the spiritual concepts which he talks about in this profound personal memoir. In fact, I don’t know anyone who has gone as far as he has (consciously) in this direction. He walks the walk. Maybe I just don’t get out enough, but the concepts and ideas/ideals in this memoir are important for people to read – if for no other reason than to at least get a glimpse of ‘the journey.’ Abhaya writes about his particular journey in an unthreatening and unpretentious way – which is also rare for such subject matter and spiritual books in my experience. I think that this little book could go a long way to becoming an American version of “An Autobiography of a Yogi” for this day and age. If nothing else, it will certainly add to the existing literature of the whole East/West canon.

-Thomas Rain Crowe

author/translator of Drunk on the Wine of the Beloved: 100 Poems of Hafiz (Shambhala)

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Fearless in Lucknow

fearlessinlucknow17poemform

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, several 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

SWIMMING is a coming of age novelization of autobiographical stories.

“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. Steve Brooks 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 Steve Brooks.”

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SWIMMING