The practice of sitting Zen shares common ground with the practice of writing—the gateways for each are difficult, and involve a fierce way of paying attention to the world. The acts of silence and breathing that are part of sitting Zen and the writer’s dedicated apprenticeship to utterance both engage us in unspoken conversation with the visible and the invisible—with our selves, with those we know, and with those who have gone before, and most of all with the known and the unknown.