Announcing 2025 SICA Project Grant Award to Benedict Herrman

by Fayra Teeters

SICA-USA is proud to announce the awarding of a Project Grant to Benedict Herrman for the recording of his audio book: “The Death of a Blind Chicken and Other Tales from a Buddhist Farmer in Texas.”

The recording took place on August 15 – 16, 2025 in a sound studio operated by Morris McClellan in Portland, Oregon; and will be edited by Michael Herrman, who will be cleaning up the recording, correcting audio errors, and adding musical bridges to promote smooth transitions between story segments by the end of August.

Benedict’s audio book will be available to download from Amazon Audio Books, audible.com and ITunes.com. Watch this column for further news of the book’s publication.

Benedict read a section of his book at the Subud National Congress this past July, tickling everyone’s funny bone – and now we’re proud to present a brief viewing of “The Death of a Blind Chicken” for your reading pleasure:

Cova Skagway’s given name was actually Cora, but when she started learning to write in elementary school 40 years ago, her lower case Rs always looked like Vs, so her teacher started calling her Cova, and as she was a shy little girl who would never be so bold as to correct an adult, she became Cova at school. Since the teacher called her Cova, her friends started calling her Cova, and since her friends called her Cova, she called herself Cova. After a while she became Cova to her mother as well, who was too busy drinking and trying on new boyfriends after her divorce to care about much of anything else.

Now, around here the story goes that Cova got herself converted to Buddhism after her husband, Ephram, returned from his last tour of duty in the Navy in Southeast Asia. While most sailors come back from their time in the service with a tattoo, a communicable disease or a trunk full of cheap souvenirs, Ephram Skagway came back with his head shaved clean and some colored beads, rattling on about how life is suffering — which, admittedly, in his little town in southeastern Texas wasn’t a tough sell. She wasn’t too keen on the whole idea at first, being raised a strict Baptist, but seeing as how Ephram had quit drinking and swearing, showered regularly, brushed his teeth every day and took out the garbage without being nagged, she figured there might be something worthwhile in it, so she grudgingly gave it a try.

It turns out that ol’ Buddha dude was big on lists. There was the Noble Eightfold Path, the Four Noble Truths, the Sixteen Arhats, whatever that was, the Ten Stages of something or other and a whole raft of other stuff Cova couldn’t pronounce, but she liked the parts about being compassionate and not killing anything. Of course, some questions popped up in her head, like could she still barbecue steaks on her grill? Did she have to give up sex like the monks did, which, now that Ephram was showering regular, wasn’t so bad, and she was painfully unsure about giving up meat, seeing as how it was Texas and people looked at you funny if you were one of those vegan-ites, or whatever they called it. Nevertheless, she gamely plunged in and started meditating with Ephram on an old pillow every morning in the living room, but still snuck in a beer or two when he was off working at Jimbo’s All-American Tire Store in the afternoons. He didn’t need the money, seeing as how he got a pension from Uncle Sam after 20 years’ service in the Navy, but he liked to stay busy and felt that changing tires on pickup trucks was a sort of service to Humanity, limited though that might seem to the casual observer.

Cova admitted to finding meditation a challenge. Ephram would start chanting what he called the heart sutra, but since it wasn’t in regular English, not to mention Texan English, Cova sat on the pillow and tried not to fall asleep or think about whether she’d emptied the lint trap in the dryer. Ephram said she had to learn to quiet her mind, but she knew the cat needed feeding, that loose board on the porch needed to be screwed down, and the damn deer had gotten into the garden again and eaten all the roses, not to mention the new corn shoots, so she’d have to replant the corn and build a higher fence, and her mind kept coming up with other stuff that needed doing, so meditation would just have to sit tight and wait its turn until the chores were done.