Xen: The Zen of the Other

 

I was going to dive into the Ong's Hat saga, as I have all of it now, but then I realized I had started Joseph Matheny's  Liminal Cycle when I read Liminal. So I decided to finish the Liminal trilogy first. 

I enjoyed Liminal, but I liked the second book in the series, Xen: The Zen of the Other, even more. The protagonist, facing a crossroads in his life, decides to go into the woods for a vision quest, as many Native Americans are said to have done. Vivid, and the pages turned pretty easily.

I highlighted some of it, including this bit:

"This whole notion of having the same name from birth to death is a con job. It's an attempt to look you into stasis and identify you as an object when, in fact, you are not an object at all but rather a continuum."

And this related bit:

"Most people are not ready to accept that they are, on all levels, a continuum and not a 'this or that.' A verb, not a noun."

There's also a long passage I won't quote in full that I liked about being an artist, rather than a businessman: "You are not a milk cow, which is, unfortunately, the relationship an artist who sells their gifts to commerce has put themselves in."