I wouldn’t be able to recall my first time sitting zazen with Myoko, but it would have been around 2002 when I was a student at Bard College and she organized the Zen group there. I was in my twenties and concerned with revolutions, and meditation offered a revolution I could sit directly down into.

My first sesshins were revelatory, though they were monumental struggles; my mind at that age was ferociously defiant and zazen was bouts of battle, though punctuated with tunnels of transcendence. But I had become a meditator, and I carried the cushion from state to state, house to house, year to year. When life opened up time I would go away to practice. When I was unexpectedly fired from my first real post-college job I went for six weeks up to Yokoji Zen Mountain Center in Southern California, Taizan Maezumi’s retreat at the nape of the Pacific Crest Trail where rattlesnakes bathe in the dry dirt and wildfire smoke shrouds the sun.

There were periods when practice drifted away; the years I lived in Tennessee, playing in country bands and drinking too much, meditation was more of an idea than a practice.

But it always returned. I was encouraged by the wise and caring practitioners I'd meet, and by the world's growing interest in studying meditation through science and psychology. Now, living in New York City, I spent a string of new years' in Rohatsu retreat at Zen Mountain Monastery beside Mount Tremper. On the first day of the new year, the Trailways bus would bring me back from the Catskill Mountains to the A train, which would then take me on a tour of the city the morning after, Manhattan freshly smeared with revelry in the daylight of a new year.

The pandemic pressed me harder onto the zafu as mandated isolation and urban chaos left me with bleak but oddly joyful expanses of time alone trying to stay balanced. Those dark months I think I matured in ways I hadn't known how to.

In my early forties I quit my technology job of ten years to take what I called a sabbatical. I sat a retreat with Chozen Roshi at her Great Vow temple in the hills outside Portland, Oregon, a center she built in an old single-story middle school, behind which, in the mossy woods, is the beautiful Jizo garden where hundreds of statues stand in the ferns holding vigils for departed children.

I had seen rakusus around people's necks since the beginning, since I first met Myōkō, and I'd chanted the verse of the kesa many times. But I had no home sangha of my own and furthermore was resistant to the idea of joining something. I was in Paris when Myōkō Osho wrote to say that her teacher, Docho Roshi, was coming to Bard College to offer the jukai ceremony. I had just witnessed a jukai during a sesshin at a monastery in the countryside of Eastern France, my partner and her mother joining the retreat. They had asked me if I had "done that" and I expressed my ambivalence. How timely to get such an invitation, from a seed planted two decades before.

I drove the three hours from Boston to the wooded campus along the Hudson River. Myōkō was by then the college’s Buddhist chaplain and had returned from three years at Toshoji. She introduced me to her current (and ever-changing) Zen meditation group, a much larger number than we ever had when I was there. They were a smiling ensemble of young artists and scholars with a pensive wildness I remember from my years there. Writing the kechimyaku brought back the gestural memory of the Chinese calligraphy course I took at the college when I was their age, from a teacher who has since passed on.

Docho Roshi arrived from Japan with Esho Sudan. Myoko had spent the night preparing the meditation hall, a low-ceilinged room in the basement of a dormitory, into a ceremonial sanctuary with walls of crimson cloth. She was aided in what we would later learn was an epic undertaking by members of the Jewish student organization and a Broadway stage designer who volunteered to help, showing up with his truck of supplies.

Roshi gave me the name Myō San. Bright mountain. The words landed softly on my heart. When I entered the room to have the name bestowed he asked if I had a question. I smiled and said no – of course regretting it later.

It took a second trip back to Bard to cut the fabric pieces of the rakusu, bringing them home in neat stacks, yet to be sewn. But when I left for a trip to Thailand that winter I put them in my suitcase, just in case. Indeed, in early January I took the flight from steamy Bangkok to frosty Okayama, arriving at the gates of Toshoji for a week's stay. With the kind help of a Swiss monastic, I put the first pale blue stitches into the dark indigo cloth.

It took yet a third trip back to Bard to continue the sewing, sitting alongside the college students for two more full days of threading the needle and stitching. The process was slow motion but it seemed clear that everything would happen in its time and place. When I returned to Boston I asked my mother, almost 80 but still a skillful sewer, to help me with the last lengths of invisible stitches on the rakusu’s straps.

Meanwhile, the Bodhisattva precepts were taking up residence in my life without delay.

Every day I observe how these precepts impart clarity, while also pointing to a lifetime of asking "how shall I?" They point to life as practice. To a life of practicing good.

They stimulate the courage to dream of bright, joyful futures.

They say prayers for our Earth mother and her symphonies of motion and life.

They accompany me warmly here in the midst of the immense clarity and blinding mystery of the great reality. Where we are all one, working for the benefit of all beings.