I arrived in Houghton, a town of four thousand people in the upper peninsula of Michigan, after a twenty-three-hour drive from North Carolina. I was tired, but excited and nervous as well, as I pulled up to the cabin where I would be living with eight other undergraduate math majors. We would be spending the next two months doing contemporary math research along with a professor at Michigan Technological University. I expected that I would figure out a few things about my career goals that summer. I definitely didn't expect the summer to change my life the way it did.

As I walked up to the cabin, I wondered who I would find inside. We had exchanged a few emails before the start of the program, and from what I could tell, we were an eclectic crew. We had the stereotypical math nerd—a sci-fi fanatic who would listen to nothing but Queen and They Might Be Giants, refused to eat vegetables, and had to watch Babylon 5 every week or he would wither away. There was a Hispanic, five foot four female basketball star from California; a Mormon girl who practiced violin every day and couldn't drink caffeine; an extremely effeminate body-builder from Harvard; and a bass player for a ska band in Alaska. My expectations were not very high.

When I walked in, three of the guys were sitting around staring at each other. Then they started staring at me. I didn't think they'd seen very many normal-looking girls in their math departments over the years. The body-builder, Nils, broke the silence: "So, why do you like math?" I sighed; it was going to be a long summer.

Several days later, I found myself sitting outside on the back porch talking to Dann, our Alaskan musician. We were talking about drugs—he was condemning them and I was defending them—when he asked me the turning point question. "Mandy, if you think drugs are okay, tell me this: How do they fit into your big picture? I mean, the things that are really important to you—the purpose in your life—how do drugs contribute to that?"

I was dumbfounded. I didn't know how to begin to answer him. No one had ever asked me about my purpose in life or what life meant to me. And I had never asked myself. I thought a lot that night, and approached Dann the next day. For the first time in my life I felt stirred spiritually; these were questions that needed to be answered.

Dann told me the story of his life, focusing on his spiritual development. His father was a preacher, and he had grown up in a Christian church. When he reached high school, he started to doubt his religion. He examined it, learned more about it, and did a lot of thinking. He explained in detail the build up to a climax he had known was inevitable—a moment of reckoning with all he had ever learned or believed.

"So, what happened?" I asked.

He looked straight at me, his clear blue eyes watery and sincere. "I fell in love with Jesus Christ."

I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. He saw the look of surprise on my face. It had been the last thing I expected to hear from him. I'm not sure why—maybe because he played in a band or because he laughed and frolicked when he played Frisbee or because he loved math, or any other number of other reasons that don't make any sense, except that they made him a normal twenty-two-year old and I never knew a normal twenty-two-year old could feel something like that. Or maybe it was because it was what I didn't want to hear him say.

Within about twenty seconds, I was crying. Dann was worried about having upset me. I was embarrassed at crying in front of this person I barely knew for reasons I didn't understand. I didn't understand that I was crying because I was afraid—afraid of what Dann thought of me, of what I thought of myself, of what God thought of me. I was afraid of not having any faith and afraid of wanting to have it.

Over the next two months, I underwent the biggest transformation of my life. I discovered piles of unasked questions that had been gathering dust in the back of my mind. Whenever I needed to talk, Dann was there. Whenever I needed a friend, Dann was there. And whenever I had a question, Dann was there to remind me that he couldn't give me the answers—I had to find them for myself.

Later that summer, we were sitting in a McDonald's in Toronto during a break in a math conference our group was attending. "What does it mean to be a good person?" I asked Dann.

"I can't tell you that," he said. "If I tell you what I believe, you won't know if it's the truth. You have to ask for yourself."

So, for the first time since I was a child, I asked God a question and wanted a response. I was afraid, not of what answer I might get, but that there would be no answer, because there was nothing to answer my question. But you know what I think? Dann let me borrow a little bit of his faith. By being a friend and opening his heart, he lent me just enough faith to get me started on my own way.

If you lose your faith, baby, you can have mine.
And if you're lost I'm right behind,
'Cause we walk the same line.

When it's dark, baby, there's a light I'll shine.
And if you're lost I'm right behind,
'Cause we walk the same line.

-Everything But the Girl

Felix walked into the café equipped with the standard Bay Area yuppie apparel: a dark long sleeve shirt, khakis, a cell phone in one pocket, and a Palm Pilot in the other. Soon we were drinking coffee and catching up. Then walking the San Francisco streets and catching up. Smoking cigarettes and catching up. Driving out of the city and catching up. Eating Chinese take-out and catching up. Upon my request we ended up at the Green Dragon Zen monastery just a half-hour north of the city, continuing to catch up.

Hiking up the hill above the monastery, I could feel the threads of my life being twisted together to make this day. After my time in the City Year program ended, and I headed off to college, Felix and I lost touch. At college I took to heart Felix’s advice to understand the world through self-knowledge and joined the Self Knowledge Symposium (SKS) student group. Through the SKS I found my next teacher, Augie Turak, the founder of the SKS. Taking Augie’s advice to plunge into the world, I drove cross-country to San Francisco during the summer after my freshman year. At the end of my stay in San Francisco, I indulged my curiosity in Buddhism with a five-day stay at the Green Dragon monastery. Those five days dragged by as I followed the daily monastic schedule of three hours of meditation, work in the morning and afternoon, and dishes detail after each meal. As my mind slowed down, I experienced a previously unmatched clarity of perception. Thoughts and feelings would arise and pass away like soap bubbles in a gentle breeze; I could do nothing but wait intently to see what the next bubble would contain. I still use my time at Green Dragon as a benchmark for clear thinking. Now, five years after my first trip to Green Dragon, I returned to the monastery grounds as a long-time member of the SKS to re-meet the man who first turned me on to spirituality.

Walking through the hills above Green Dragon with Felix, we settled into the kind of intense, honest discussion we had been used to on the Number forty-nine bus in Boston six years ago. I still hung on his words after one of his thoughtful pauses. Only Felix could listen to me rant for half an hour about the need for excellence and rigor in the pursuit of truth and calmly reply, "Yeah, I know what you mean, but frankly I am more concerned with not being cruel than not being hypocritical."

"Holy shit. I never thought of that. Is my effort to do the right thing and to hold myself to high standards an excuse for ignoring other people?!"

As we talked, I wondered what made Felix a teacher to me. Strangely enough, I didn’t think of his insightful mind or warm attentiveness. Instead I thought of the patched streets of Boston. I thought of the homeless man that begged in front of Burger King at Downtown Crossing every day. I thought of the despair I could feel in the air every time I got off the bus at Dudley Square. I thought of the stack of immunization records I filled out at Boston City Hospital without ever seeing a single child immunized. Recalling my time in City Year and how I adopted Felix as a mentor, I was reminded of a quote from Andrew Harvey in Belden Lane’s book The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, "We are saved in the end by the things that ignore us."

Aside from being extraordinarily depressing to an eighteen-year-old liberal idealist from the suburbs, the indifference I found in the streets of Boston turned me into a student. It opened me up. I had very clear evidence that I didn’t have all the answers to poverty, crime, or suffering (even my own), and was ready to listen to Felix when he went on about Lao Tzu, Emmanuel Kant, and the importance of self-knowledge.

Likewise, it was not just Augie’s charisma and sincerity that made him such a great teacher, but also my own disillusionment. When I arrived at college, I quickly discovered that many of the students in my freshman dorm spent nearly all their time on grades, getting laid, and complaining. College did not turn out to be the philosophical playground I had anticipated. A real community was so hard to find, despite the overwhelming number of fraternities, student clubs, classes, and cliques. I also soon learned that I had difficulty just getting up for my 10:10 class, never mind contributing to a community or sparking deep conversation. When I went to SKS meetings on Tuesday nights, I was ready for Augie and the rest of the SKS to be teachers.

Certain disciplines are supposed to open up a practitioner the way the environments I found in Boston and at college did. They act as teachers. During my time in City Year I concluded that the answer to my dissatisfaction with the world was not going to come from the world but from within me. Since then I have tried out a number of classic spiritual disciplines, including short stays at monasteries, celibacy, yoga, prayer, meditation, and vegetarianism. The biggest lesson I learned from these disciplines is a skepticism that any particular discipline will be the answer. At a small dinner party one Sunday, the mild-mannered mother of my friend’s girlfriend remarked, "No offense James, but every vegetarian I’ve met has been the son or daughter of an affluent suburban family." How true.

To the extent that doing yoga and meditation every day for a year and a half was valuable, it was because I did it every day regardless of my mental, physical, or emotional state. This practice was entirely indifferent to my fatigue, restlessness, soreness, embarrassment, or general self-importance as a busy student at a prestigious university. As a result, I was taught just how little control I had over myself, as I struggled to stay awake and focused for a mere half-hour per day. I watched as I pushed off my meditation until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. on Saturdays even though this practice was supposed to be the most important part of my life. This practice was indifferent to social custom and my need to fit in. Once, I welled up with embarrassment when my host brother in West Africa walked into a room where I was trying to hold a particularly awkward yoga position. I braced myself, figuring I would be thrown out of his home for violating one of the laws of the Koran. Instead he smiled at me and joked in his broken English, "Ahhhhhhhhhhh, Yogi Yoga. Can you bend a spoon?"

Talking with Felix on the hill overlooking the Green Dragon monastery, I knew that he had continued to share his gift for mentoring long after we had parted ways. I knew that Augie and the rest of the SKS were continuing to meet three thousand miles away back in Raleigh. I knew that the SKS student group at UNC I had worked so hard advising was pushing ahead without me. I knew that the monks at the monastery below had no memory of me or the gift they had given me during my short stay in their community. My irrelevance in these situations was simultaneously relieving and painful. Maybe all of these teachers were giving me one basic lesson that is captured in a quote from John Andrew Holmes that I received appended to an email from a business prospect (another unlikely teacher): "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others." Maybe we are saved by what ignores us. Maybe we are not that important. I guess all any teacher can do is show you who you are not.

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