Zenlightenment: Mind-Opening Insights About Love, Life, and Happiness

by Michael Pastore

Here is a feast of wise sayings, remarkable remarks, electrifying passages, and original haiku, each one pointing a way to happiness, inner peace, and the wisdom of the heart. These 500 mind-opening quotations include more than 50 never-published-before gems of Eastern enlightenment by Ming Li and Hokkumeboshi. This bright book also includes Pastore's captivating parable - "The Wise Woman and the Dying Man." Zenlightenment is a book for dreamers and seekers, and for everyone who desires a life of more creativity and love. This wisdom of the heart is epitomized by H.D. Thoreau: "Whenever a man hears it he is young, and Nature is in her Spring," and Hokkumeboshi: "This is not a book/ it's a bright path calling you / home to your true self. "

172 pages, Paperback

Published June 4, 2015

About the author

Michael Pastore, is a novelist, a non-fiction author, and a poet who lives in the counter-cultured city of Ithaca, New York. He has traveled extensively -- always by bicycle, often sleeping under the stars -- in the USA, Europe, Turkey, and Greece. His more than 20 books include Thoreau Bound: a Utopian Romance in the Isles of Greece; Lark's Magic (a funny novel for children); Zen in the Art of Child Maintenance (novel); Zenlightenment; The Zorba Anthology of Love Stories; New Techniques in Child Maintenance; The Ithaca Manual of Style; and Teaching Kindness and Peace. His book of poems is Sappho at the Edge of Love: 100 poems by Michael Pastore.
Pastore's articles, essays, and interviews -- about literature, sustainable living, children and childhood, humanizing technology, and creativity -- have appeared in more than two dozen print publications nationwide. He lives in the small city of Ithaca (New York, USA) with his library of more than 8,000 of the world's best books. About the importance of literature he writes: "Why read? ... The best books give us timeless hours of portable joy, expand our empathy and imagination, remind us of our past, bring hope to our future, caution us to live wisely, empassion us to seize the moment, show us ideals embodied in heroes and heroines, inspire us to be great lovers and rebels, give us courage to dare to be ourselves, corroborate our most sublime feelings, and point the way to deeper meaning in our everyday lives."