THE LEGEND LIVES ON...

What others are saying about the book…

“When I first encountered The Tao of Taro, I was wearing my critic’s lenses and skeptics garments, but soon discovered a poet-in-the-making and a mind well worth getting to know. I was immediately taken by Taro’s riveting account of swimming the Thompson river rapids, a significant endurance test, even for someone trained in the martial arts. His U.S. prison experiences are gripping in a different way, where mental agility proved to be the lifesaver and how not to respond positively to a “cookie eating monk”, a “saint in an orange suit",” and a “spiritual arsonist,” who can laugh at his own follies and transformations, admitting that he’s “asking questions meant for mystics on mountain tops?”

— Gary Geddes, is the author of The Resumption of Play and What Does A House Want?

“There are a few who live life to its full with all the passion, tenderness, agony and grace. Through the depth and power of his expression, Taro Zion Joy quickens us to attention, offering a glimpse of the sanctity and wild abandon of such a one.”

— Ann Mortifee is a singer, song writer and the author of In Love With The Mystery

"A religious upbringing has left me allergic to claims of accessing and sharing higher truths, so I approached The Tao of Taro book warily. But Penny Joy’s touching introduction to her son drew me in. And from Taro’s first essay, I realized I was reading the words of an extreme risk-taker, always in search of transcendence. In powerful prose pieces, Taro reveals finding windows to that state through his most vulnerable moments – ‘meeting god on my own’ in a raging river; enduring ‘days full of boredom that resemble nightmares, and nights full of dreams that resemble hell’ during a year-long incarceration; and doing hard physical labour while detoxing at Burning Man, ‘sweating and hurting with the rank intensity of being tarred in the noonday sun’. Of all the altered states he describes, the most touching is the ‘Satori’ of gazing at his brand new daughter, when he is floored by pure love. ‘If I were ever to be remembered for anything, I would want it to be that a child could love me enough to sleep in my arms, to run to me when afraid, and to speak my name to find strength.'"

— Maria Coffey, author of “Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow and Explorers of the Infinite”.