John Scarffe, Nederland. Two months ago, Nederland author Hoag Holmgren released two new books. No Better Place: A New Zen Primer, and paleos, a book of poetry inspired by Paleolithic cave art, were published by Middle Creek Publishing, a small press in Beulah, Colorado. His first book, Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts, which Holmgren co-authored, was published in 2018 by West Virginia University Press. 

Holmgren graduated from the University of Colorado’s graduate program in creative writing in 1997, in Boulder, after completing a master’s degree in humanities at Wesleyan University and an undergraduate degree in English and philosophy at Muhlenberg College. He has lived in Nederland with his wife, Leda, since 1999. 

They have raised three children here, and he has worked from home full-time as a non-profit executive in the higher education sector. He served on the RINK Board of Directors for 10 years and currently volunteers as a meditation teacher at Tadasana Mountain Yoga in Nederland.

Over the years, Holmgren’s poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Gettysburg Review, StoryQuarterly, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Mid-American Review, Quarter After Eight, Double Room, Drunken Boat, Buenos Aires Review, spacecraftproject and other venues.

No Better Place: A New Zen Primer is based on 25 years of Zen Buddhist practice and training. From 1994 to 2010, Holmgren trained at the Zen Center of Denver twice per week in addition to attending seven-day retreats where participants sit in zazen (silent, still meditation) for several hours per day in 30-minute rounds. 

Since 2010, he has continued to practice with his Zen teacher, Danan Henry Roshi, who is semi-retired and now lives in Twin Lakes, Colorado. Holmgren is currently an apprentice Zen teacher.

No Better Place has received a fair amount of praise. Andrew Schelling, poet, translator, essayist and editor of The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry, wrote of No Better Place: “Among the Zen handbooks or primers out there, none fit your hand so simply as these sixty-four poetry-like chapters of Hoag Holmgren’s No Better Place. Like the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, each widens into a far-off state of mind. 

“Turn them over in your thoughts though, and they prove to be guides to where you are standing. Ten in particular, which refer to the 12th century Chinese Oxherding Pictures, point North American Zen back to a mythic world of ancestors. 

“Old time Buddhas, those ancestors. They are our brothers and sisters in the ecology of mind. Thanks to Holmgren’s book, you can stand eyebrow-to-eyebrow with them.”

Jiun Hosen Osho, Abbess at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center in New Mexico, wrote of Holmgren’s book: “These words will touch and inspire readers to surrender to a joyful experience of compassion for all.”

Rafe Martin, an award-winning author and Zen teacher in New York, writes, “It says so much so succinctly and insightfully, that reading its brief chapters brings real “Aha!” delight. I look forward to sharing this book with my own Zen students.”  

Holmgren’s book, paleos, was inspired by the proto-geometric shapes found in Paleolithic cave art, which may be the earliest evidence of attempted writing. The publisher writes: “The paleos project was inspired by the discovery that a number of distinct glyphs, signs and geometric symbols recur in Paleolithic rock art around the world. Ice Age Europeans used these geometric symbols over a period of 30,000 years, suggesting that the markings could have been used to transmit information — a possible early step on humanity’s long road to developing writing and abstract representation.”

The poet Juan Morales writes of paleos: “In these poems, Hoag Holmgren sends us back to memories etched into the rock and elements. These are incantations that invite us to commune with the primitive pastoral.” 

No Better Place: A New Zen Primer and paleos can both be found in Nederland’s favorite rock shop, Nature’s Own, on Amazon, in bookstores and on the Middle Creek website: www.middlecreekpublishing.com.

Of his three books published in the past year, Holmgren believes No Better Place has the widest appeal. He said: “As a culture, we’ve perfected the art of being super-busy, cultivating opinions and feeling stressed out, but we’ve lost the connection to something deeper and unmoving. 

“Zen practice gives us a chance to shift our allegiance from the confetti parade of mind to a larger, more inclusive experience of being alive. In the process, we loosen up a bit. We uncover a curious kind of completeness in everyday acts and interactions. 

“All the things we tend to dismiss as ordinary begin to look suspiciously like the extraordinary — and vice versa, and we’re able to live this one fleeting life with greater clarity, creativity, joy and kind-heartedness, Holmgren wrote.

Holmgren said he began writing as a kid in Connecticut and was first inspired by the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. He is able to write most mornings and is a big believer in revision. 

“I might re-work a single paragraph a hundred times before I’m happy with it,” he said. He’s not sure where he gets his ideas for writing, but he believes reading, washing dishes, spending time outside and the act of writing itself seem to play a role. His creative process is “nothing unusual” — he just tries to write consistently. 

Next writing projects include a book on meditation and anger, and a co-authored book on contemplative pedagogy. He hopes to support the growth of a Zen practice community in the Peak-To-Peak area and is offering Zen meditation classes on Tuesday mornings from 7:30 to 8:30 a.m. in Nederland at Tadasana Mountain Yoga, and on Sundays, from 4 to 5 p.m. in Black Hawk at 7 Healing Stars. 

“It’s a tough sell,” Holmgren said of this practice of intentional stillness, working with koans (a meditation tool used to see beyond linear, habitual thinking), and everyday mindfulness, “but it has an amazing power to open hearts and enliven minds—here and now in the 21st century”

(Originally published in the June 13, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)