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Accessible and elegant teachings from a well-loved and revered woman Zen teacher."The truth and joy of this life is that we cannot change things as they are." The import of those words can be found beautifully expressed in the work of the woman who spoke them, Katherine Thanas (1927-2012) - in her art, in her writing, and especially in her Zen teaching. Fearlessly direct and endlessly curious, Katherine's understanding of Zen was inseparable from her affinity for the arts. She was an MFA student studying painting with Richard Diebenkorn, the preeminent Californian abstract painter, when she met Shunryu Suzuki, author of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, in the sixties. Soon thereafter she decided to drop painting to dedicate herself to Zen, which she did for the last forty years of her life.