The teacher gave us socks and coats and whatever we needed to stay warm. Then he threw open the windows and the one heavy door and clacked the sticks together twice: Be still. The breeze rushed in; it chilled our cheeks and hands and burrowed through fibers to seize our bones. On it rode a thousand calling birds—oh, the birds granted voice to travel that clear arc above and below. Dessicated leaves warned in scuffs and scrapes that the next chill would soon push through, reinforcing the last.

From that silence emerged. And there in that vast nothing was the cacophony of the self, eternally unnoticed and now foreign and frightening. It cries, and its cries are unbearable. How callous I must be not to hear this ocean of life.

The too-tight tendon bowed across the knee. Smacks across our backs.

He knows when we grow restless and took us for a walk. He said that clarity within movement is the most difficult to achieve and that it is what monks practice. Every moment, clarity; every moment, a dialogue with the self.

We circled the room, the gelid breeze wending among us. Birds mustered the morning and the year's retreating life scratched and scurried toward places of rest.

He invited us to sit again and, having our full attention, began to talk. He recounted the history of the temple, including how it came to be that an American woman became its benefactor. How she had married a Japanese priest to protect him from internment in American camps during the war, and how, after he died anyway, she returned to establish a program to teach nonJapanese people about zen.

Then he clapped the sticks twice and sent us out—again, out—into the world.