Erik Storlie
MEMORIES OF SUZUKI Roshi FROM WIND BELL AND DC FILES - #38 - Erik Storlie
Psychedelics, Meditation, Vision, the “Mystical”: Observations Over Sixty Years - An article by Erik Storlie, McKenna Academy website, Feb. 19, 2024
Sept. 10, 2022 - Note from Erik on
50th anniversary of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center
10-27-2020 -
Lineage Delusions and
Lineage
Delusions Revisited by Erik Storlie
2-14-11 - Suzuki and Katagiri student Eric Storlie on dharma transmission in an article entitled Lineage Delusions in Sweeping Zen dot com.
Erik Storlie's Beginner Zen dot com website
Eric Storlie letter-1 (posted 6-01-13)
Letter from Eric Storlie - too weak - redo (posted 5-13)
Storlie, Erik.
Nothing on My Mind: Berkeley, LSD, Two Zen Masters, and Life on the Dharma Trail. Shambhala, 1997.
[A good picture of the sixties Zen Center,
Suzuki, Katagiri, and students.]
Awakening the Mindstone from Nothing on My Mind: Berkeley, LSD, Two Zen Masters, and Life on the Dharma Trail. Shambhala, 1997. [A good picture of the sixties Zen Center, Suzuki, Katagiri, and students.] (posted 6-01-13)
On the 50th Anniversary of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center from a note to Wendy Pirsig and DC September 10, 2022
OMG: one half century, and more if you consider that our local stuff began with beverly white (born 1919) going to japan to practice and then in the sixties going to sokoji to meet suzuki and becoming the seed of the group.
what we did reminds me of Rumi's great poem: see below for a few lines:
Start a large and foolish project,
Like Noah.
Don't listen to what anyone says!
so with bob and nancy's help we built an ark to float the practice. a
lot of strange animals walked up the gangplank. with a handful of
naive, hopeful, idealistic young people who didn't listen to common
sense we brought the katagiri family without knowing how we'd support
them. claude dahlenberg was very dubious of the whole thing.
despite many stumbles over the decades, it must have all been an
enterprise with some
QUALITY.
11-16-13
- Erik Storlie’s new memoir: Go Deep & Take Plenty of Root: A
Prairie-Norwegian Father, Rebellion in Minneapolis, Basement Zen, Growing
Up, Growing Tender -
Amazon link
11-16-13 - Erik Storlie’s new memoir: Go Deep & Take Plenty of Root: A Prairie-Norwegian Father, Rebellion in Minneapolis, Basement Zen, Growing Up, Growing Tender - Amazon link
A death in 1900 on the Dakota prairies sets in motion this memoir of a distant father and his son, a story of growing up and growing old that winds through the sedate Midwestern fifties, explodes in the cultural turbulence of the sixties, and finds meaning in a fusion of family, writing, teaching, and the eastern contemplative arts.
Here we experience the underground Beat scene in Minneapolis that inspired the early Bob Dylan. We meet the poets Robert Bly and James Wright. Finally, we share the author’s struggle to transmute psychedelic explorations into Zen and mindfulness – and to become a loving son, father, and husband.
Critics have called Storlie’s most recent book “a treasure.”
From Pagan Kennedy, columnist for The New York Times Magazine series “Who Made That,” author of The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories:
“In Erik Storlie's remarkable memoir, he takes us on a mad tour of Secret Minnesotaand this is not Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon. I loved discovering Storlie's Midwestern beatnik paradise, a place where Bob Dylan and the poet James Wright might show up at the next party. Storlie was one of the original Minneapolis mystics; he searched for the ecstatic, the illegal, and the unspeakable in the bars of Dinkytown. What he found will delight the reader.”
From Chard deNiord, author of Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs, Reflections and Conversations with Twentieth Century American Poets:
“Reads like a novel…with a sprezzatura comparable to On the Road…fresh, firsthand accounts of Storlie’s turbulent, romantic, experimental, literary days…an essential witness to both hurt and ecstasy out of which so much genius emerged… Storlie has made a valuable contribution to American poetry with this book.”
From Michael Dennis Browne, author of Things I Can’t Tell You:
“In Erik Storlie’s superbly detailed and touching memoir, we see how, by way of many tensions with both parents, and by an evolving liberating attention to their veiled individuality...he gains insights into their hidden natures and comes to an awareness of what he calls at one point ‘sorrow beyond my fathoming’….This is wonderfully tender, accurate writing, and brings us into the presences, events and relationships of one writer’s past that can enhance the present for all of us.”
From James P. Lenfestey, author of A Cartload of Scrolls: 100 Poems in the Manner of T'ang Dynansty Poet Han-shan:
“Superb writing and deeply honest storytelling…with gorgeous and harrowing passages of love found and lost, of his hanging out at the University bars and parties…intense, mad, destructive drinking…the inside story of the arrival of the counterculture - particularly poetry, acid, Zen - in the Twin Cities…from one who lived it from the inside and who does not gild the ego.”
From Scott Edelstein, author of Sex and the Spiritual Teacher:
“Erik Storlie’s previous memoir, Nothing on My Mind, recounts the arrival of psychedelics in Berkeley in the mid-1960s and his experiences with Zen teachers Shunryu Suzuki and Dainin Katagiri. He refuses formal Buddhism, convinced that America and Americans need meditation practice, but not the ceremonial and cult-like elements of Japanese Zen. Go Deep and Take Plenty of Root takes us a step further, demonstrating that Asian meditative practice can be reconciled with and can deeply infuse an American life.”
Erik Storlie’s first memoir, Nothing on My Mind: Berkeley, LSD, Two Zen Masters (Shambhala 1996), describes the upsurge of interest in psychedelics and Zen in San Francisco, his struggle to integrate the psychedelic experience with meditation, and his study and practice with Shunryu Suzuki and Dainin Katagiri Roshis. He completed a PhD in American Studies and taught for thirty-five years at an inner-city college in Minneapolis. He now teaches meditation and mindfulness and leads retreats for the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota.
Here's a picture of my brother and me as we rebuilt the floor of the cabin in about 1970, the summer before i came to live at page street--arriving horrified to hear that roshi was dying. i'm on the left.
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