‘I first came to Sokoji in a truck. I was still living near the Art Institute where I’d been a student and some of my friends from the institute had started sitting – Ginny Baker worked with Cheryl Faus at SF extension. Cheryl was a student at the institute and maybe my best friend at that time and Cheryl and Lynn and Jordan Goode started sitting, and one day they said, we’re going to come pick you up in a truck tomorrow morning at five o’clock. And I said okay so that was the first time I went to Sokoji. Cheryl and Lynn were sisters. They were both at Tassajara for the first training period.
What impressed me first about Suzuki Roshi was he was so completely trustworthy. I had just come from my first attempt to work on myself to work on myself – it was with a psychiatrist and I had been abused in that situation so my hopes of finding help were really dashed. Suzuki Roshi was a model of someone that was trustable and I felt so safe with him because I felt like whatever destructive impulses I felt would be inoperable around him. It was a very powerful experience for me when I first met him. It was 65 or 66. 65 I think. He represented from my point of view a synthesis between the two sides of my image that I didn’t know how to put together at that point and that I didn’t see any models for in our culture. He had a very strongly developed artistic sense which I could see in his stone work and in his garden and he was also a very compassionate and humanitarian human being.’ (from Cuke.com)
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