Wind, Waves and Zen

All the world's a stage
And all the men and women merely players...
Shakespeare, As You Like It
On a solitary sailing excursion, surrounded by the calm of the soothing sea, one man comes face to face with a tide of questions: What do we live for? What do we mean to other human beings? Where do we stand in the greater scheme of things?
Dirk Bornhorst invites the reader into a meditative journey via a candid dialogue, unraveling in dreamlike, phantasmagoric scenes "which flew into the author's pen almost without his intellectual participation", as he confesses - the world, a stage populated by multidinous characters, is acted out before us, the privileged spectators. Wind, Waves and Zen is written simply, but it is far from simplistic, and induces in the reader a clarity of mind which is a truly refreshing experience.
Dirk Bornhorst was born in 1927 in Lübeck, Germany, and grew up in Maracaibo, Venezuela, where his father and grandfather had been working as merchants since 1854. On a trip via Asia to Europe the family was surprised by the Second World War, and so the author received his schooling in German schools in Kobe, Japan and Tianjin, China, where he finished his high school. After studying architecture at the University of California in Berkeley and at the E.T.H. Zürich, he has worked since 1952 in Caracas as an architect and university professor.