Intimacy is the home of poetry. Even many of those who cut a wide swath between them selves and their poetic heart, who otherwise have no interest in poetry, find themselves turning to poetry in the torrent of grief or the clutches of love. These two polarities share a common quality: a deep, profound, and often raw intimacy with life?. Our intimacy with life is not reserved only for moments of emotional avalanche. To me, the real bounty of poetry is the way it transforms our relationship to the mundane world. When we are willing to taste all the varietals of intimacy, every thing in life comes alive and we ease into conversation with the swelling presence of people, places, and things around us. Everything is shouting at us to awaken into this intimacy: to put down the weight of our aloneness, to create a space without rivalry, to bring ourselves and the world in which we live to life. In this sense, poetry is the language of "awakening." Every spiritual tradition uses the analogy of awakening to describe moments of access to a heightened awareness, which is often characterized as arising from the slumber of everyday life. A good portion of stories in the Buddhist tradition are about awakening. The stories often end with the protagonist being enlightened. This end-point is the spiritual equivalent of the classic western story ending, "they lived happily ever after." Enlightenment, like happiness, is not a thing you achieve?. It is a continuing journey. There is, however, a common arc to the story line. This book is organized into five sections that describe an archetypal path for individual spiritual evolution.