Advance Praise for WANDERING CLOSE TO HOME
A Year of Zen Reflections, Consolations, and Reveries

The gentle, kind and sometimes bracing wisdom of the offerings in this collection together create a lovely meander through the thickets and open pastures of life and practice. These brief but profound reflections will help you to do your own wandering, in a way that brings you closer and closer to home. Savor and enjoy.
–Henry Shukman, author of One Blade of Grass and Original Love, co-founder of the meditation app The Way.

David Rynick writes with an intimacy that never fails to nourish. The many gems in this collection will bring you back again and again to the truth and wonder and mystery of being alive. Wandering Close to Home is a book to be savored and to be shared with the people you love.
–Robert Waldinger, MD, Author of The Good Life and Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

David Rynick is a well-known Zen Teacher who has written an encouraging and extremely useful handbook for how to live with yourself and others. He points out how through small practices, the life you already have can become full of wisdom and kindness. David shows the sacred quality of the domestic life, and the practices and kindnesses that build community and help us get along. His writing has a lucid and transparent quality, effortlessly making meaning and delight out of the events that overtake us everyday.”
-John Tarrant is the author of The Light Inside the Dark, Zen, Soul, & the Spiritual Life, and of Bring me the Rhinoceros and other Zen Koans that will Save your life.His next book, The Story of the Buddha, will be released in December by Shambhala Publications

Part inspiration induction and part users guide to life, David Rynick’s Wandering Close to Home hits home in many pragmatic ways. Keep it by your bedside, and savor little bits every night.
-Judson Brewer MD PhD, New York Times Bestselling Author of Unwinding Anxiety and The Craving Mind

Read this book and enter a garden of wisdom! David invites you in to his seemingly ordinary life where the finite becomes infinite and sacred. His Zen is refreshing, boundlessly creative – and ultimately yours, too.
-Trudy Goodman, PhD, Founding Teacher, InsightLA.org

If you’ve been too busy, with too much self-doubt, and nursing too many complaints about your life, this book is good medicine. Begin with a leisurely stroll along the avenue of titles in David’s Table of Contents–already a flowering poem of Zen wisdom. In the brief entries of David’s life we glimpse myriad moments of self-questioning, samurai courage, and sudden awakenings within himself, with other people, and with flowers. David is a spiritual spelunker, committed to the search for wisdom that lives just beneath the surface of our worrying rush through the hours of our daily routines. As I read this book, David’s easy, kind, and unself-conscious humor is continually displayed on my smiling face. This is an extraordinary, humbly composed and heartfelt book, and as I finish reading, I realize that I have met a wise and unassuming man who happens to be a Zen master. Most surprisingly, I see that this Zen master has surrendered his noble title into daily life with real estate taxes, rambunctious chipmunks, clients in education, ministry, and business, and a stone Buddha who changes continually with the seasons, all of them, as he says, his “perfect teachers.”
-Dr. Robert A. Jonas, author My Dear-Far Nearness: The Holy Trinity as Spiritual Practice and The Essential Henri Nouwen

This is a healing book for the heart. I’ve had the deep pleasure of knowing David Rynick for many years. Reading his book gave me a chance to hang out with him in his garden again. I believe you will also find Wandering Close to Home to be a wonderful read, like scooping cool water from a clear pool. My advice – read it slowly. Or rather, savor it. The sections are short (like this one life), after all, and so there is no hurry. There are so many lines that caused me to pause, breathe, and read even more slowly, like this: “Our essential choice is whether or not we align with what is already true.”
-Dosho Port, author of Going Through the Mystery’s One Hundred Questions

David Rynick is a wise and gentle guide on the mysteries of birth and death and our ordinary magical lives in between. This Truth Never Fails has had a place of honor on my bedside table for many years. It has now been joined with Wandering Close to Home. David’s deep understanding of Zen permeates this wonderful collection of brief meditations. Perennial wisdom found in this moment and this place. What a treasure!
-James Ishmael Ford, author of The Intimate Way of Zen: Effort, Surrender, and Awakening on the Spiritual Journey

With gentle humor, poise, heart wisdom, and a fund of stories from the everyday, David Rynick’s reflections offer ways for seeing the self and the world beyond the “dark tangle of wishing things were otherwise”. His childlike wonder for the sacredness of life is wonderfully infectious, and nourishes the soul even in the midst of the tragedies of life. Read, pause, read, listen, pause again, look up – and hear his loving invitation to open your heart and mind to the grace of the present moment.
–Mark Williams, Professor Emeritus in Clinical Psychology, Oxford University, Co-author of Deeper Mindfulness

I love David’s wise and heart-filled book. For each of us there is a birthdate and a death date and in between, the dash. This book is about the dash and discovering our humanity within the realness of life, the bitter and the sweet, the ordinary that sometimes becomes the extraordinary that is right here and now.
-Bob Stahl, Ph.D., coauthor: A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook

For so many of us, contemporary life has exceeded the jarring and has entered the regions of the toxic. David Rynick’s clear-eyed observations offer gentle paths toward what is actually true beneath and behind the noise. These are beautiful meditations for all of us learning to be in recovery from the trauma of the world.
-Rt. Rev. A. Robert Hirschfeld, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire and author of With Sighs Too Deep For Words

David shows us that by living deeply within the ordinariness of everyday life, we can recognize for ourselves that the ‘treasure we are looking for is already here, hiding in plain sight’. This book gently and joyfully points us to how awakening doesn’t happen out there somewhere, it happens in the context our own messy, beautiful, incomplete daily lived experience – if we discover the ways of looking that David is revealing to us. What a relief!
–Rebecca Crane, PhD Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice, Bangor University, UK

In Wandering Close to Home, David wanders through his garden, his soul, his relationships, and the world; and he pays attention — to his internal critics, his creativity, his desire to be present to what is. These elegant short chapters are invitations to look beyond and beneath our daily concerns, and claim acceptance — of reality, of self, and of the truth of the world, whether we approve or not. His book is a gentle but firm challenge for the reader to “engage more fully in the constantly self-renewing world of life itself.
Rt. Rev. Mark Beckwith, author of Seeing the Unseen: Beyond Prejudices, Paradigms and Party Lines

If you’ve ever felt worried and uncertain when facing unfamiliar territories, or simply tired and slow, worn out by the gap between your life as it is and how you want it to be, you will find encouragement and solace in David Rynick’s Wandering Close to Home. Writing during the enforced isolation and uncertainties of the COVID pandemic, Rynick beautifully describes how ordinary everyday activities – gardening with his toddler grandson, searching for a pen that’s mysteriously gone missing – can be pathways to the heart of life. In clear, luminous prose he shares personal experiences that illustrate ways of escaping our self-imposed limitations via moments that, as he put it, “seemingly don’t matter.” In the process he rekindles our sense of wonder. Generously, he honestly relates his doubts and difficulties side by side with his inspirations and insights. Rynick exemplifies the ancient wisdom of the Way: how appreciating each moment as enough, is abiding contentment in truth.
–Rev. Robert Rosenbaum, author of That Is Not Your Mind!:Zen Reflections on the Surangama Sutra

David’s writing weaves together his experiences as a Zen teacher, personal coach, writer, father, and grandfather. His capacity to dissect and extract meaning from simple observations invites us all to do the same and to understand ourselves better. These short reflections have become part of my daily meditative practice and open me to seeing possibilities in my own life.
-Jay Himmelstein, MD, MPH, Professor Emeritus, Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences, UMass Chan Medical School

In Wandering Close to Home, David Rynick, Roshi takes us with him to the vital, growing edge of this very moment. This is the place of everyday miracles. Zinnias sprout, tea steams in a cup, and deep wisdom wells up from unexpected sources. In Rynick’s words, Buddhists, Christians, people of many faiths and no faith in particular will find inspiration and practical tools for navigating life’s joys and challenges. I highly recommend this book!
Rev. Dr. Todd Grant Yonkman, PCC. UCC representative to the National Council of Churches Buddhist-Christian dialogue. Author of Reconstructing Church

This is a gem of a book rich with wisdom filled with anecdotes from daily life that reflect
a life lived fully through the practice of awareness. It is practical and relatable inspiring
us all to wake up to this moment and the richness within and without with perspective,
humor, and wonder. I appreciated its honesty and depth.
-Elana Rosenbaum, LICSW, Author of The Heart of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

“David’s book sparkles with gems! He offers daily reflections – flashes of wisdom and connection with the mundane, marvelous moments of a typical day of being awake and alive. As I read, my heart opens and a smile of ‘yes!’ emerges. ‘Seeing’ David in this way, through his contemplations on gardening, grandparenting, and his internal discussions with the gremlins of doubt and worry, I delight in the recognition of our common humanity, and I feel ‘seen,’ too.“
-Carol M. Greco, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

David’s reflections on his life offer warm companionship to being present as each of
our moments unfold. They are a wonderful invitation to pause, and reflect on
awareness of being, here, whatever we find. Reading the chapters slowly, taking
time alongside David, became a mindfulness practice reaching into my life. I imagine I could read this book many times over and discover something new each
time.
-Sarah Silverton, author of The Mindfulness Breakthrough

In these daily observations that cycle through a year of seasons, David Rynick has the knack of seeing the profound in the ordinary and the beautifully ordinary in the profound. A garden and its endless mysteries, a tiny grandson jumping in a puddle, midnight doubts and migraines, a joyful curiosity for the moment as it unfolds — the subjects of these letters range from the lifespan of the universe to the nanosecond of right now. With its warmth, humor, and bountiful wonder, “Wandering Close to Home” is a manual for being human and a book that speaks in the voice of a friend, of ourselves, of us all.
-Ty Burr, American film critic, columnist and author of “Ty Burr’s Watch List” on Substack

Whether teaching-to-teaching, step-to-step, breath-to-breath, moment-to-moment, or word-to-word–author and Zen teacher David Rynick incrementally links our experiential existence of Life from the individual ordinary to the expansive extraordinary.
-Larry Yang, author of Awakening Together: The Spiritual Practice of Inclusivity and Community

At once simple and profound, innocent and wise, this little book of reflections shines with insights cultivated over many years of thoughtful, humble practice. With poetic, keen observation, David Rynick offers us important lessons on living life through honest descriptions of the most ordinary moments. It is like a collection of prose haiku illuminating our path through the challenges of modern life.
-Ronald Siegel, PhD Author of The Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary: Finding Happiness Right Where You Are

These essays sway gently in a dance between intimate vulnerability and penetrating insight. Unflinchingly honest, plain, never reaching for more than what is right there; David offers his readers fresh, delicate, daily lessons from his own heart. Whether learning from sprouts in the garden, his toddler grandson, or the joys of skygazing, these brief essays – themselves a chronicle of the disorienting first year of the Covid epidemic – drew me in over and over; an incredibly rare and skillful interweaving of surface simplicity and depth of impact.
-Dave Woessner – Episcopal priest, spiritual director, and meditation teacher (Samatha Foundation)

The book is beautiful – absolutely the kind of text you keep next to your bed so you can read one small piece as inspiration each morning. In short vignettes David Rynick shares deeply thoughtful and meditative insights about his life and the world around him. Early on in Wandering Close to Home he writes about the beauty and challenge of meeting our lives where they are right now – noticing when we have reached our limits and using those moments to open ourselves up to unexplored perspectives. Wandering Close to Home’s lyrical reflections remind us that in a difficult world, there are still endless possibilities and it is always possible to begin again, to see the world anew. This is a book I will savor chapter by chapter, one day at a time in the year ahead.
-Rabbi Allison L. Berry, Temple Shalom, Newton, MA.

Reading Wandering Close to Home is akin to having a long series of conversations with an extraordinary wise man of the human tribe, a spiritual friend who riffs on life’s everyday experiences to open the reader to sensing the spiritual depths that surround us. Drawing on wisdom garnered from life coaching and insights arisen from his Zen teaching, Roshi David Rynick leads the reader to sense the “emerging aliveness of life itself,” a guiding existential aspiration that he shares with relentless honesty and loving-kindness.
-Todd Lewis, PhD, author The Epic of the Buddha 

A charming collection of personal reflections and poems gathered over the course of a year. David Dae An Rynick – guiding teacher of the Boundless Way Zen Temple in Worcester – conveys the feel of a life infused by Zen practice. Worthy of being savored slowly.
Richard Bryan McDaniel, author of Zen Conversations and Cypress Trees in the Garden

David the gardener claims that he is not detail oriented. All evidence of his life reveals detail. Likewise, He is a lover. In these essays, what David details is love. Love in all its veils and reveals. Love in its messy, grace-filled, bewilderingly unbridled beauty. So, if you’d like to make your own lovely acquaintance afresh, wander with David in his garden. You’ll feast on cherry tomatoes, nasturtiums, marigolds, birdsong as accompaniment to the reveries and reflections of a wise human being with a soft voice and a big beating heart revealing yourself to yourself.
Saki Santorelli, EdD, MA, author of Heal Thy Self: Lessons on Mindfulness in Medicine