These poems are selected from Matty Weingast’s newest book, The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns, a reimagining of the Therīgāthā. Matty is co-editor of Awake at the Bedside and former editor of the Insight Journal. He completed much of the work on these poems while staying at Aloka Vihara Forest Monastery, a nuns’ monastery in northern California. A pdf version of this article can be downloaded here. For a while, I wasn’t sure what had drawn me in so completely. But as … [Read more...]