Whenever I am half-asleep or half-napping in my bedroom I love to hear the sound of a stick broom sweeping the driveway outside. It makes me feel that life is simple, that there is nothing as soothing as the thought of a person joyfully performing an everyday task like sweeping, that there is also something truly centering about the Japanese artists' acts of sweeping sand in deliberate patterns--both for the artists and for the beholders of their art.