It was a quiet Friday evening. I sat by myself at a small table at Yoshi’s in Oakland, enjoying some sushi amidst the wood grain and rice paper, the stones and bamboo, the artful Japanese calligraphy on the walls. Mana, the Maitre ‘di, spoke to me gently as is her nature and asked if I had ever met Yoshi. No, I hadn’t, I responded.

She came back with a diminutive Japanese woman who held an amazing energy. Bright, strong, and creative is how I would describe her.

” Are you spiritual?” she asked. I said something about having come from a yoga class and did enjoy spiritual matters.

“Why don’t you come to do some meditation, Sunday morning at 9. Here’s the address”. She wrote it down on a business card. Yoshi’s is something of an institution in Oakland, a jazz club where I had seen Mose Allison, Ahmad Jamal, Taj Mahal, and others.

I felt honored that she invited me to her meditation center, and planned on going. She explained to me that she also does improvisational dancing and teaches the Japanese Tea Ceremony, of which I had heard but not seen. After dinner I went to the show, The Spanish Harlem Orchestra, danced, and enjoyed a non-alcoholic beer.

Sunday morning came. I was at the address she gave me, a quiet neighborhood at the foot of the Oakland Hills, a generally posh area. I saw an impressive Dominican Chapel and grounds, but did not see the opening in the wooden fence along the front of the house next door.

I finally spotted the gate in the low, brown, weathered redwood fence, reached over and flipped the latch, and entered. Inside was an older wooden one story home, and a gravel strewn walkway with flat stepping stones in the center that led to a small out building away from the house. I walked to it and found a few people removing their shoes, preparing to enter. I joined them and we went inside.

There I saw the interior of this Zen Buddhist meditation hall. I had been introduced to Zazen, the practice of sitting in a meditative posture the Zen Buddhist way, many years before at a Zen Center at Green Gulch, on the coast north of San Francisco. It had been a long time but I remembered how to sit: eyes half open and centered at a point about three feet in front, back straight, seated on a meditation cushion, allowing the ideas that enter one’s mind to leave as quickly as they come, watching one’s breathing with the inner eye, and hands held in a mudra, one palm on top of the other and thumbs touching as if there was a thin piece of paper between them.

I sat in zazen for 40 minutes with another ten meditators. Then came the service, more challenging because it was in Japanese. It was Yoshi herself who played the ceremonial drum and bells.

This was Yoshi’s Zendo! The two Zen Buddhists priests who joined us were like most zen priests I had met, with a good sense of humor and a down to earth quality, but with a very keen spiritual presence. But it was clear to me that Yoshi was the driving force behind this center of peace and meditation, and my respect for her grew.

That night I dreamt of a dragon and a bear. The bear was friendly, even loving. I knew I would return.