Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World

By Katie Arnold

Book Overview

2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Finalist in Adventure, Sports & Recreation

A Zen study wrapped in a memoir of destruction and healing written by an elite ultrarunner as she struggles to make it to the other side of a life-shattering injury with her sanity, and her marriage, intact

After flipping her raft days away from help on a trip down the remote Salmon River, Katie Arnold's shattered leg tests both her spirit and her marriage for years to come. It also reignites her meditation practice and motivates her to dive into Zen in search of healing. Before the accident, Katie was an elite ultrarunner with a simmering but adequate marriage who avoided being indoors whenever possible. But who is she afterwards?

In the midst of hardship, Katie turns for support to the Zen practice she had long dabbled in. Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World is a Zen study wrapped in a memoir that tells the story of a search for stillness by a woman born for wildness. Spanning roughly two years, from shortly before the accident through the long, uncertain healing of both leg and marriage, it is a personal narrative of that tumultuous time nested inside meditations on Zen.

Having gone from a reluctant spiritualist to a Zen practitioner over the course of a decade, Katie Arnold offers unique company for those seeking nature's exquisite highs as well as for creatives, spiritualists, and sensualists who want to slow down and examine the possibilities of a well-lived life. As the late Japanese master Shunryu Suzuki wrote, "Sometimes a flashing will come through the dark sky." These brief flashings are enlightenment--moments when we suddenly feel as if we're part of everything, and everything's part of us. This book is about how to experience the flashings when they come, and about what they mean for how we live our lives.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1952692695
• ISBN13: 9781952692697
• Release Date: April 2024
• Publisher: Parallax Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

I’m obsessed with this book

I just finished reading this book. For context, I’m neither an athlete nor zen. I can’t stop thinking about this book, both because it was enthralling hearing her story and insights, but also because at times I hated her. Where are her kids when she’s off running or meditating for many hours every day? Where are the sack lunches and the grocery shopping and the laundry? When her stepfather finally tells her after she’s been gone four hours, yet again, that she needs to help out more, I tend to agree with him. I find her selfish and unrealistic and am left wondering what job her husband has that can buy them a house in the Santa Fe foothills and support their family while she meditates and runs at all hours of the day and night? I’m so mesmerized by her story but it strikes me as the story of a young twenty something with no commitments rather than a midlife mother. Her whole book feels like an apology wrestling with an admission of narcissism, wrapped in a beautiful zen koan wrapper.