John was speaking again, "Now go into yourselves and think of the thing you would be most afraid to do in front of this group." Five minutes of silence went by. Then John said, "If you want to tell the group what you're most afraid to do, please do so. Or just do it. You don't have to, but it is by taking the biggest risk that you stand to gain the most." The boy would hear that often before the week was out. The biggest risk. What was it? What would he dare?

A woman named Elizabeth began to speak. "I would be afraid to fart," she said.

"Can you fart, Elizabeth?" John asked.

"Yes."

"Will you fart?"

"I'm afraid to." There was silence, and Elizabeth farted.

"Thank you, Elizabeth," John said and farted.

As he remembered that morning, the boy chuckled to himself. Was that reality--a young man and an old kind woman farting back and forth? He didn't know, but he remembered that at the time it had seemed deadly serious.

Only Elizabeth had dared to tell her greatest fear. The others remained in silence--a silence, for the boy, that was funny, schizophrenic, and absurd. There he sat, feeling the warm sun pouring through the windows and bathing his body, feeling the strength of the land and the mountains that surrounded them all, feeling his own strength--and yet unable to escape the strange, gnawing tension that was building in this group where people farted back and forth.

For their next exercise, John told them to close their eyes, crawl around the room, and touch. That was nice. While they all crawled around, hugging strangers, feeling arms and legs and hands and stomachs and feet, John lit some incense. There was only silence--the silence, and the drowsy, lovely smell of the incense, the bright morning sun, and a group of bodies which lost their ugliness when the boy shut his eyes. No words, no voices, no faces, only the bodies; and the boy liked that. He happily hugged everyone, everyone hugged him, and played with his hair.

About ten minutes later, John told them to find quiet comfortable places, and then to open their eyes. The boy found himself lying on his back, stretched out in a little area of sunshine. Other people were sprawled out in other positions, but the boy noticed Elizabeth sitting with her back to the wall, and a wise, tender, loving expression on her face. Slowly the group regathered into a circle.

"It is very important," John began to say in his quiet, soothing voice, "that you do what you want." He was kneeling, sitting back on his heels, and as he spoke he looked slowly around the group, looking into each person's eyes, looking into the boy's eyes, then moving on. "If you can tell me what you want, I will ask you, 'What are you going to do about it?'" Again there was silence, and the boy felt the question boring into him.

SLOWLY the boy was coming to recognize subgroups within his group. There were, first, the old women, 50 to 60 years old, of which Elizabeth was one. In all, there were four old women. Second, there were the young women, 30 to 35 years old. There were three young women. In a way the boy found the young women uglier than the old women. Age, he knew, had a beauty of its own; but these three--the young women--had none: they were dumpy and flabby and sexless, and at this point the ugliest of them spoke.

"I want to know why Elizabeth looked so sad," she said. Her name was Susie. "When I opened my eyes, I saw Elizabeth sitting against the wall, looking sad, and I want to know why."

"What are you going to do about it?" John asked.