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one’s own lifeblood.’”
    Mako wasn’t supposed to be born. She revealed this fact undramatically on a damp January day six months after the 2008 fire. It was the beginning of the winter practice period—the new students were still sitting in the zendo. I’d driven in to Tassajara to do a first round of interviews. We sat in one of the stone rooms, a fire glowing in the wood stove. Mako explained that having carried one child, her mother was told she couldn’t get pregnant again. When Mako was conceived despite doctors’ predictions, she was not expected to survive. At thirty-six years old, Mako radiated an undeniable robustness, a willful inner strength that had pushed her out of the womb and into the world.
    She was born in Baltimore, to a Japanese mother and an American father of German descent. Her features—both delicate and bold—reflect those mixed roots. Her presence is powerful, extroverted yet self-contained. She holds herself upright but often stands with her hips askew, forefinger cupping her chin, in conversation. When she laughs, which is frequently, she throws back her head with a sharp “ha!” Her brown hair turns cinnamon in the summer, when she has hair—she shaved her head when she became a priest in 2004.
    Before that, Mako studied philosophy as an undergraduate and pursued a graduate degree in neurobiology, figuring that if she wanted to understand the mind, she ought to understand the brain first. “But there wasn’t enough big picture in it for me,” she told me of the days spent peering through a microscope. In 1997, when she was twenty-five years old, she moved to San Francisco.
    She’d learned transcendental meditation at fifteen and had heard of San Francisco Zen Center, but she was wary of organized religion. She’d read about abuses of power by spiritual teachers. She thought Zen Center seemed too big and institutional, maybe too patriarchal, and what she knew of Zen seemed like “mind tricks.” But she decided to check it out for herself. She started to meditate at City Center. She volunteered in the library. “I’d go when it was closed,” she told me, “which is funny, because I wanted to meet people.” She was searching, she later realized, for sangha, or community, one of Buddhism’s three treasures, along with the Buddha and the Dharma.
    One evening, she gave what’s called a way-seeking-mind talk, introducing herself to the community, talking about her life and her path to practice. Through that talk, she connected with a senior priest interested in Buddhist logic. And through that relationship, she was drawn into the sangha at City Center. Eventually, she became a resident.
    But she wanted to complete some unfinished business—her philosophy master’s degree, held up by a paper on philosopher Immanuel Kant. She’d started it many times but could never finish. In December 2001, she sat a seven-day meditation intensive called a sesshin . Sesshin means to “gather” or “receive” the mind. It also means sitting in meditation from long before dawn to well after dark on a cushion, facing the wall, with breaks for work and rest, but only enough to make so much sitting possible. A kind of sheer, objectless concentration and feelings of profound connection and contentment can arise, a sense that the self and all of its concerns have dropped away. But the mind can also be rambunctious, distracted, tired, angry, bored, anxious, obsessed. The Zen meditator’s aim, whether in a regular forty-minute period of meditation or over the course of many days, is to accept whatever emotional or mental states arise and not hold on.
    This particular sesshin that Mako sat occurs every December in Buddhist communities all over the world in honor of the Buddha’s enlightenment. When the seven days ended, Mako whipped out her paper. She got her master’s degree. Not