The Earth House

They hadn't pictured themselves as the sort of people to take up Eastern spiritual practice. But on their first visit to a Zen center, two women discover something that speaks to them on a level deeper than their everyday experience, and they begin to make a new plan for their lives. What if they were to give up their suburban comforts and build a house beside a monastery in the mountains?

As the walls of the house go up, the two women make and re-make plans, wrestle with a chainsaw, learn to make windows, and set up a computer powered by the sun. Their spiritual practice transforms their vision of the house, and the building of it transforms them both. But their endeavor leads to an ending, not a beginning -- at least not the kind of beginning they'd had in mind . . .

"A moving meditation on life, death, love, and Zen Buddhism." Feminist Bookstore News