First You Shave Your Head

When a Zen master invited Geri Larkin to join him on a spiritual pilgrimage to Korea, she had a spiritually incorrect reaction. One might think "that I would be swept away by emotion, stunned at my good fortune," writes Larkin in First You Shave Your Head. Instead, she obsessed over the mandate that she shave off all of her hair. "If I was going to be a card- carrying pilgrim, then I had to peel my fingers off of my last scalp of identity--my hair," writes Larkin, whose other popular works include Stumbling Toward Enlightenment and Tap Dancing in Zen. This self-effacing, witty narrator speaks with an unabashedly, all-American frame of mind, helping Westerners see themselves walking the Buddhist path. As Larkin treks through the mountains and monasteries of Korea, she shares her pangs of hunger and her fear of the unknown as well as the bliss of "magic moments," such as drinking green tea in a hermitage that was carved into a cliff. This travelogue shows us what it means to journey toward enlightenment with humility, or at least good sense of humor. --Gail Hudson