July 2008Anchorage, Alaska

Early morning. I am sitting zazen in a room with ten or twelve other people. It is summer in Alaska, in this small and familiar city where I now live. Koun is visiting Shogoji, serving as a translator for a handful of other foreign monks. I have not heard his voice for two weeks—my only way to talk to him is to wait for his call from a payphone at the base of the mountain. And so he does not yet know my secret: our child, this new life, unfolds inside of me from the dark, like a flame flickering into being.

Breathing in, breathing out

in every moment,

here.