Gilding the Lily

Douglas was a typical American youth coming of age in the early 1970s. Being caught by the tail-end of the counterculture movement of the ’60s, he very much began to question the values and ideas of the society in which he had been raised. Coming to terms at the age of eighteen that he would not likely fit into society, he drifts into drug use and begins planning to purchase a sailboat in order to leave the country and head to the South Pacific. As this dream begins to crumble and his despair grows stronger, he finds himself addicted to heroin, then on the way to prison for possession. It’s there where at the end of his rope, he discovers Buddhist practice and begins a long, bumpy ascent up from the nightmare of addiction and incarceration. This is a gut-level, nothing-sacred account of how, both then and now.