The Teacher Appears

Dear Kathy,

I wanted to take a few minutes and thank you for what I can only call your enlightened kindness. Your weekly Tai Chi Chih class has become the highlight of my week. I look forward to it with a great sense of excitement every week, and in between classes the books you provide bring some hope, a sense that I am still growing, learning, and becoming stronger despite the restrictiveness of my current environment.

It takes a very special kind of person to volunteer to come here all evening and give of your time so freely to inmates, the forgotten people of this world. When you leave, everyone is noticeably in a much better mood. Part of this I attribute to the tai chi, the rest of the credit goes to you.

I often get to laughing about the profound truth in the Japanese proverb, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” From the time I was 16 I tried to put myself up against the best martial artists in the world. I hold fourth dan or above in Shoko-Kan, Aikido, Seido-Kan (Okinawan), and Iaijutsu. I trained from age 8 with Sensei Okazaki in Philadelphia until the age of 23.

Why I laugh is that even here, in a federal holding facility, where I spend 23 hours locked in a pod, a teacher of yet another Asian art form has managed to appear. It’s amazing, really.

The fact that you give us all your time for free is the subject of many recent discussions among us, your students. I wish there was some way I could repay you; others feel much the same way.

In the free world I am an executive in the Dodge car business. Perhaps if you ever need transportation purchase advice I can be of service, or if you need an article written on the prison program from the insider’s point of view—whatever I can do to say thank you, I will do.

I didn’t realize how much I needed something like Tai Chi Chih until I started to do it. Before I would try to overcome my feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness in here by fighting them—trying to work each minute of each day to micro manage each small detail of life, like trying to get 10,000 messages to my girlfriend to please come visit, which she has not done yet in the months I have been locked up.

Practicing tai chi chih allows me to release instead of to fight, to win by letting go instead of trying to grasp yet tighter. Again, please accept my humble thanks for the work you do here, and for the books, which are treasures of knowledge and hope in a dark place.

Sincerely,

– John Daniel Mutter