"Whenever I chant, 'Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them,' I picture San Quentin's gate.

"Before I was a Buddhist student, San Quentin got me down, and I didn't like going there. Now I try to make each trip to death row a pilgrimage — sad, but spirit-moving.

"As I drove over the Richmond Bridge, I see Mount Tamalpais, the mountain many call the Sleeping Lady, at rest over the prison, her green, brown, purple, blue clothes changing moment to moment with the light. Morning and night, she wraps herself in a white shawl of fog. The men inside the prison can't see that they live at the edge of water on the skirt of a sleeping mountain.

"Beside the parking lot at San Quentin is a little cove on the bay, a crescent between the western foot of the gray steel bridge and the prison. Wood scraps and bits of trash drift in and out on the gentle slap of the water against a beach of algae-covered rocks. Neither the birds nor the tides that swoop into that cove and swirl out alter their rhythms because of anything that goes on inside the prison walls above, not even an execution.

"As I sit on a log, breathing out the prison, I remember the last midnight vigil I attended at San Quentin's gate. As the lethal injection was done, we drew our little crowd close. In silence, each of us reached out to those around us. Through my coat, I felt the press of a comforting hand on my back between my shoulder blades. My fingers found the warmth of a stranger's hand. The pastor who ministers inside the prison began a prayer: for the executed man and his family, for the victims and their families, and for the prison staff who had to carry out this act. Then she added a prayer for the legal workers. 'This is not about winning or losing,' she said. 'This is about doing our very best, every day.'

"Sometimes I forget that my life in this struggle is not mine alone; we who oppose the death penalty are connected, as if we stood close enough to touch all the time. My life in this job is not a dusty box of papers after all. It's my life, shared with others."

"I've renewed my vow to go to the gate for every execution."