The Story of the Book Token
There is one book that lives at the center of this game: Be Here Now by Ram Dass.
It belonged to my father.
It traveled with me to the Renegade Temple at Burning Man, a temple I built in grief and grace with the friends and family of Sean—my trickster brother, my fellow prankster in spirit. Sean and my father died ten days apart.
We burned the temple under the Nevada sky, and that book burned too—pages curled into smoke, joining their laughter in the ethers.
Sean, who was our Neil Cassidy.
My father, whose idealism cracked in Vietnam.
And me, the daughter who once begged to attend Naropa in 1999 only to hear, “I’m not paying for that hippie college.”
I got there eventually. The thread was always calling.
Naropa. Where the Beats met the Dharma.
Where I served as a student leader hosting Tibetan monks who painted mandalas made of sand and silence.
Where Karma Against Ignorance was born—drawn from the realms of Buddhist psychology, but also from the real lives of those I loved.
Because grief is a path.
Because play is a dharma gate.
