Go Deep and Take Plenty of Root, Erik Storlie's latest memoir, explores his conflicted prairie-Norwegian roots, a sixties Beat scene in Minneapolis that inspired the early Bob Dylan, friendship with the poets James Wright and Robert Bly, and his almost fifty years of Zen meditation. This book illuminates a tectonic shift in American life, Storlie's embrace of the contemplative arts, and the real-world challenge of bringing an idealistic meditative practice into marriage, divorce, raising children, and the deaths of...

This work is Storlie's memoir of growing up through the upheavals of the 1960s, a portrait of a generation that turned away from traditional culture and embraced a world of drug-induced states of consciousness, alternative lifestyles, and Eastern spirituality. It begins in Berkeley, experimenting among friends with Zen meditation and LSD. But when chemical enlightenment failed to ignite, Storlie retreated to the wilderness where he realized the importance of meditation practice. For many years Storlie studied under Shunryu Suzuki and Dainin Katagiri, both Zen masters. His intimate portraits of these men combine with accounts of three decades on the Dharma trail, to provide a vivid account of one man's search for meaning in modern America.