What she discovered, she says, is that when she was in the moment, with her baby, there was no problem. "I was grieving something else that didn't exist that I thought I was going to get. I was fearful of what was coming, how he would be treated, would I know what to do, what would happen to his sex life. Everything that was causing suffering in me had nothing to do with the here and now. The here and now with Willie was always wonderful."

Hamilton knows many stories told by famous monks, stories that illustrate the Four Noble Truths. But she also has a favorite Willie story, from a morning when her son was 12. "I'm trying to get off to work, and everybody's got to do their job, and Willie's in the bathtub and I want to make sure he knows what he has to do. So I walk in and say, 'OK, Willie, I'm going to work now and I need to know what are your jobs. What's your job?' He has a cup of water and he's going like this," Hamilton remembers, pouring an imaginary cup of water slowly in the air. "And he says, 'Now.' I just bowed and walked away. Now. Right now. That's really the teaching."

Zimmerman and Hamilton were married in 1998. Last year they both took the vows to become Zen Buddhist monks, and, as part of the ritual — a symbolic letting go of all their attachments — their heads were shaved.

To be a Zen Buddhist monk in the West is different from being a monk in Japan or China, where lay Buddhists donate money so that career Buddhists can live a monastic life. In the East, in fact, Zen Buddhists rarely even meditate. But in the West, where essentially every Zen Buddhist is a convert, lay people can become monks, continuing to live their regular lives as they also seek, as Buddhists say, to understand the nature of their own minds.

Zimmerman and Hamilton meditate every morning — "sit," as meditators say — at home or at the Kanzeon Zen Center. They attend classes on Monday and Thursday nights and on Sunday mornings. Hamilton helps direct Genpo Roshi's "Big Mind" program. Zimmerman is chairman of the board of the center.

Being a monk, Zimmerman says, shows a commitment to both the practice and to the lineage. Buddhist teachings could just shrivel up and die if it weren't for people being committed, he says.

The center, located in an old house near the corner of 1300 East on South Temple, is one of those hometown secrets, more well-known in Europe than in Salt Lake City. It's part of the White Plum Sangha, a Zen lineage founded in the 1960s by Japanese Zen Buddhist Maezumi Roshi. Maezumi was one of just a handful of Japanese Zen masters who arrived in the United States in the 1950s as, in effect, Zen Buddhist missionaries.