Roadaor

By Carson Gardner

There are untold readers who have gone back to the Dao de Jing again and again, whenever they are in exceptional, unremitting and mystifying inner pain. The Dao offers tantalizing enlightenment, challenge, comfort and hopeful resilience; but has always been at least a bit difficult for the harried modern reader to decipher. The author of Roadaor often found his experience much the same: he started out reading and thinking, began to get a faint inkling of peace, balance, meaning and purpose; but then he either ran out of time or of patience, stopping short of really completing the lap. Life goes on. The next time he spiraled in limping through anguish, as all humans eventually do, he might get just a little farther before succumbing to the pace of disruptive desperation and zinging off on an escape tangent. The last time this began to happen, Gardner, a seasoned poet, finally made a personal commitment to sit still and think about what he was reading until he found clear echoes of purposeful, useful pavement-level truth within himself. This book of poetry is the result, those personal echoes of truth. This is not a scholar's candlelight-vigil translation of the Dao; it is a wanderer's personal illumination--by streetlamp! "If this way fits, let it move you...improvise!"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carson Gardner
• Release date: May 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310790140

Carson Gardner

Carson Gardner, a genuine Minnesota-native codger, is a board-certified small-town family doctor and a founding member of the Park Rapids Jackpine Writers’ Bloc. He left the practice of corporate medicine in 1999. Since then he and his wife, Gail, have been living and learning on Gaa-waabaabiganikaag—Land of Abundant White Clay—the White Earth Ojibwe/Anishinaabe Reservation. He has actually had a few poems published—even fewer prose works—and wrote lyrics for an album entitled The Heron Smiled; which helped its singer win a 2001 Native American Music Award. Gardner is bear-clan, a cedar flute player, a traditionally-observant pipestone carver, a joyful dog rescuer, a perennial student of Ojibwe language, culture and spirituality, a hard sci-fi and straight- ahead jazz fan, a compulsive storyteller and an ingenuous dreamer who frustrates sophisticated cynics right and left. He even has a day job—medical director of the White Earth Nation Tribal Health Department and Reservation Ambulance Service.

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