A Tale for the Time Being

Today, I'm gonna build on that.

If you are time, if you are time and I am time, what happens when two time beings meet? How does time flow between us across distance, memory, aging, and even death? And to help us, today I'll talk a little bit about this book by Ruth Ozeki, this novel, called A Tale for the Time Being, which she wrote after immersing herself in Dogen with my friend, Norman Fisher.

She became a Zen priest, wrote this book.

So this book, which I've had on my bookshelf all these years, so much that I couldn't find it the other day.

This book came out in June of 2026 and is a book of short stories.

So Ruth Ozeki wrote A Tale for the Time Being in 2013, which is a finalist for the Booker Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award winner, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

She also wrote My Year of Meats, and All Over Creation, along with a handful of some nonfiction books.

She's a Japanese-American writer with a father who was an anthropologist, and the reason I'm saying these things is because I could really feel and see pieces of those things throughout the book.

So here's one of the places I saw that anthropologist father appearing in her storytelling.

And there was just a beautifully sad backstory for the closeness of this grandmother and granddaughter and the supporting characters that made it feel real and full.

I'm going to go back and read a tale for the time being because Ruth Ozeki is really just a beautiful writer.

And I can't wait to see how she handles a set of characters that carry through the entire book.