BOOKS
In the tradition of Rumi, Hafez, Nanak, and Kabir, Will Crow’s home ground is certainly devotion to the experience of the divine. But rather than mysticism, his experience of the divine is schooled in the scientific and modern. Like fellow American Whitman, he speaks commonly, robustly, lovingly. Like Gary Snyder, he is about the organic paradigm change needed for the global future. And like the Zen and Taoist poets, Crow is a citizen of the local, of the natural, but occupies the whole of the universe as well.
Will Crow resides near Pokhara, Nepal, now for some years. He has lived in San Francisco and Northern California his whole adult life.
All Folios and books are free to download.
FOLIOS - In Imperial China, poetry was prized. Scholars versed in poetry, calligraphy, and painting composed sets of 16 calligraphies and exchanged these poems with their fellow scholar/poets. Here in the sound-bite info-age, Will Crow feels similar inspiration. He likes to assemble poems in folios of 24 (more or less) by topic... BIG DEAL POEMS- like the Folios, are shorter collections, collected by topic. With these poems, Mr. Crow dives into the deep end. These poems are relevant, revelatory (and humorous). Do you like to swim in deep waters? Check Big Deal Poems out... LAY OF THE LAND POEMS - Here are poems location specific. Crow, if nothing else, is a child of Nature. Natural living roots one into the dirt, and tunes one’s head to the light of the sky above... O the business of birds, o the radiance, o the engine of the sun, o the photosynthesizing carpet that covers, o the wonders in the pink of a plum blossom…
Nisanan Home...Home at Hawk's Nest
Lay of the Land Poems 2023 v3.0
Will has been settled in for over a year now... settled in off-the-grid... off-the-grid in the wild here in the California Sierra Foothills... here an hour's drive up from gold-bearing Nevada City/Grass Valley. Herein are the experiences… the expressions… of an enthused spirit… of a sometime Taoist-type hermit… of a pilgrim pursuing the reality of consciousness … of a being allowing his thread to weave into the fabric… to weave into the fabric of the natural that this world spins…
The Privilege
24 Poem Folio 2024 v3.4
The 2024 USA Presidential election is over and being... being a life, being human... still contains the privilege... the beyond humongous, crazy privilege of being conscious... of being here, being now... of being alive one breath at a time. This 2024 folio is Will's most direct... is Will's most direct call to action. Rise up... rise up into your own inner liberation... embrace your own inner transcendence. Such is no harder than letting go of the mind's controlling addiction to analyzing everything. Let our heart's endless childlike love of being here win the day. One breath at a time. And the world one lives in will clarify and contain an everlasting sustaining certainty... and will be truly independent.
Included amid is a love letter to Space X.
HUNGER
24 Poem Folio 2017 v4.0
At the core of life sits hunger. At the core of creation sits hunger. In the beginning was hunger, and hunger went Bang! And Bham! here we all are. And still our inflating universe pursues a state of satiation... restlessly. And so too… what we are… within…our heart’s longing… is that same hunger seeking the unqualified peace of the luminous ocean that is timelessness. This Folio includes selections from Crow's early works.
THE BRUSH OF YOUR FINGERS, THE TOUCH OF YOUR LIPS
24 Poem Folio 2021 v3.0
The belief… within the bourgeoisie… is that a yogi is one who forgoes the sane good life for self-denial in pursuit of rarified experiences. Renunciation…no sex, no sensual pleasures… are exchanged for “divine” access. Ya‘ know... Saint Francis, Rama Krishna, and all those other good ole boys.
And a shout out to Mother Theresa too. Yes, there seems to be an equation regarding spiritual power… deny bodily pleasure and ones awareness transfers “upwards”. Forego sensuality (sex)… and shakti (kundalini/tantric) power is awakened. Tue enough, perhaps. Will has indulged in such at times. Done right... it focuses chi and intention. But-but… he prefers being true and free. He finds renunciation is a corral and he prefers running wild. Prefers the carrying on… prefers the raw of life. And liberated, such authenticity wallops with undiluted bliss. So, in this folio he offers poems that celebrate the sensual. O the pleasures of the flesh, of the intoxicated brain, of making love. The Essential Realization frees… opens the Source… unleashes the awesomeness of sanity and sensuality. Understand, many are the perspectives that can be had in simply what one experiences. To experience from a conscious heart brings fullness and bliss.
HEY BUDDTHA HEADS, HEADS UP
Folio V3.0 2018
Two thousand four hundred years ago, a man restless, privileged, confronted by life’s random cruelties, became an obsessed, relentless seeker. “What is suffering? How to live life?” His answers today still ring true. Siddhartha’s revelatory breakthrough into human essence has become a religion. Became a religion that works like a ladder one climbs towards "The Enlightenment". We are all Siddhartha… disappointed, restless, seeking... seeking while we are externally consumed by our needs to accomplish and provide. Crow recognizes that our hungry hearts keep our minds seeking. The Buddhist concept of Enlightenment appears difficult, out of reach. Here Mr. Crow speaks of his experience in terms familiar to Buddhist practitioners. However, his experience is not of the difficulties of a climb upon a ladder. It is of an elevator that opens efficiently onto the level of being alive free and enthused here and now.
FUCKED UP BUT NOT SO MUCH ANYMORE
24 poem Folio 2016 v4.0
This collection rubs upon the chafe of existence. These poems are of the need for inner liberation from one's mind. They are drawn from Crow's pre 2017 work. Mr. Crow sings of his experience of the transforming divine, of the liberating realization of the Source each of our beings is formed of. Given Self-Knowledge at 23 years of age, Crow soon came to the reality of the unity of all things/all being. His life is lived as a student of Prem Rawat, whom he terms the Masterpilot. These poems speak of the fundamental passion/perspective that can lead to the liberating realization.
HERE IN THE GREAT COLLAPSE
A Big Deal Folio V6.0 2010
here we go!
Written originally in San Francisco in 2012, this is an early Folio. Compelled by an anticipation of climate change... by his experience as a student of Self-Knowledge and by a love of San Francisco... Will's vision of the future of mankind is of a rebooting... is of an appropriate human re-start/adaptation upon a massively transforming planet (now set in radical transformation for the next thousands of years). For each of us and all together as a species... it would behoove us to let go of "life as we've designed it". And get with... embrace the changes. This Folio is funny, gritty, educating, inspiring, revelatory.
A STORY IN EVERY MILE
A STORY IN EVERY MILE Big Deal Stories V3.0 2021
The naughty… the dying… the murdered and martyred… life after death… a party at the end of the world... the suffocation of a suburban traffic-jam… the other-abled… the drunk and the drugged… the cursed and the cussing… the elated, the elation... the musing of a long haul truck driver… a creed of biomolecular quantum genesis. The stories herein flow from the Shakespearian side of Will Crow… stories told through the penetrating poetic lens of Will’s Zen.
Will gets his mind blown now and again… mostly now… for he likes to be taken over the top by the beauty and the profundity. These short pieces and stories want to blow your mind. What is it like to wake up reincarnated in the warmth of a sea on a water world… why did a construction crew compete in a toad batting contest in the Australian Outback… how does a Chinese princess wind up in San Francisco’s S&M scene? These stories are drawn from Will’s direct experience… and they celebrate the humble and his fellow salt-of-the-earth.
TWO DOGS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
A wisdom BOOK - fiction V5.0 2011
Tales of a 21stC Southwestern Indigenous road-dog holy-man… his adventures, the road trips, a pizza and wine party amid a chat with Phd’s in a nuclear-physics lab… American life laced with the insights of inner realization… revelatory rants from an unapologetic psychedelic pilgrim’s Aboriginal perspective… and a how-to-deal-with techno-urban civilization’s careen into catastrophe… make this book not only a wild fun read but confronting. Those not psychedelically initiated… those working their way through climate change realities will perhaps be challenged by this… this first book by Will Crow.
DEAREST BELOVED
24 Poem Foliov3.2 2024
“Beloved” is a very personal collection of poems. Will Crow is a devotee… and ho… he’s not all that interested in the job of being a “poet”. Poetry has become the vehicle. “Poet” is a label, a box… rather Crow’s free-wheeling devotion is inspired to sing… is thrilled to voice his passion. Herein are poems to Prem Rawat, his guide/teacher. Devotion is a rifle that aims, spins love’s bullet straight into the heart’s purpose. We all are devotees of something… that or we are prone to depression. May this collection elucidate the beauty, the depth of the relationship between a student and the living Master-teacher.
MOUNTAIN OF GOLD, VALLEY OF GRASS
Lay of the Land Folio. V4.0 2018
Gold and Grass… California! … the new New World… the Zen of Stoned… the new New Frontier… pilgrims of transcendence… Shrooms, LSD… tribes of outlaying, early-adopting Alternatives… modern urban hunter-gathers… the grit of the inner-city melting pot… post-Capitalism’s collectivized, worker-owned tribal culture. These… these are fodder for this collection of poems. Will Crow cut his teeth in San Francisco’s hippie Haight-Ashbury/Berkeley’s UC in the late sixties. He is engaged in a life-long passionate love affair with the Bay Area, with natural California, and with the Southwest… having roamed widely with his dogs in his ole’ pickup.
This collection is in two parts… parts which differ as much as the uber-techno urban environment departs from the primal, wild rural. Mr. Crow’s perspective is the unifier. He has continually said he feels at home both only in the inner city or in the outer untamed.
TENDER DELIGHT
24 POEMS FOLIO V4.0 2019
This collection is for devotees of the heart’s molten enthusiasm … for those who… who sit and know breath... for those who as they live, love being alive. These poems come from the intimacy of a life awake to the Essence. They are like my hands held out, cupped to capture for you something delicate… to capture a thing so delicate as the scent of a flower… to capture such as the delicacy of a bloom which opens only for a moment… and in that moment effuses the scent of the divine’s tender delight.
HEART and SCIENCE
Big Deal Folio v3.5 2017
As an American student in the sixties and an ardent life-long learner, Will Crow is schooled in the methodology of science and technology. He is fascinated with the discoveries of such as molecular/neural biology and quantum/cosmological physics. In this collection of poems, Will weaves insights of his heart-felt living and transcendental experiences into the scientific world-view.…
the unformed goes Bang, and from this... the Source... from the One comes the two… comes inwards and outwards, clock-wise and counter-clockwise…and from these two has come the all…have come the formed... has come creation like a multitude of wave forms interacting as an ocean of time...
KICKING IT IN KATHMANDU... CHILLING IT IN KHUMBU VALLEY
Lay of the Land Folio V3.0 2020
This second Folio of poems of Nepal centers around Mr. Crow's experiences in Nepal’s ancient capital. Again, Will, from his contemplative, heart-felt observations, writes of life as being a pilgrimage of consciousness. In this collection, the backdrop is the teeming, atmospheric alleyways and temple squares of the antique Tibetan-Buddhist Kathmandu Valley. Kathmandu was once home to three different small Kingdoms. Each dynasty competed to furnish sacred sites. Today, developed Kathmandu still abounds with these ancient, but still active temple complexes. Inspiring as Kathmandu is, Will found the Khumbu Valley/Sagarmatha National Park area which houses Mt Everest to be even more awesome. On the border with Tibet, Khumbu Valley is surrounded by eight peaks over 20,000 ft and houses herds of Yaks and small villages which maintain age-old Tibetan-Buddhist traditions.
HIGH IN THE HIMALAYA - A YEAR IN THE LIFE
Lay of the Land Folio V1.0 2016
Brother Will published this folio in Pokhara, Nepal in 2018 as a fund raiser for a Nepali food assistance program. These are poems from his farm/farmhouse composed over several years living in a traditional Nepali village. If you have ever visited Nepal, or visited South Asia, the poems will speak to you. If you haven't had the opportunity, they will none-the-less intrigue you.