What is the sound of 12 people meditating?

Not much: There’s the steady breathing that seems somehow like one breath, as though it would take more energy than you possess to exhale out of rhythm with the others in the room. A stomach gurgles, a foot shifts with a rustle, and the sounds ripple briefly through the pool of your attention.

Other noises are more distracting.

The furnace switches on and off. Ditto the refrigerator. Outside, a bitter wind blows off the lake, moaning dismally through the trees and around the building.

But here in Orono, indoors, 12 silent adults sit cross-legged on thick cushions and breathe in and out, in and out, pursuing “clear mind” and attending minutely to the swirling grain of the polished maple floor.

This is the beginning of Zen meditation as practiced and taught by Marilynne Petit, a friendly, informal, middle-aged woman from Rhode Island.

“The goal of Zen meditation is to be as completely awake as possible,” she explained over a cup of pre-meditation tea at her kitchen table. “To come back to a place in your mind before thinking, to be completely aware of what you see, what you hear and what you smell.”

Unlike other forms of meditation, Zen does not seek a dream state or trancelike transcendence. Instead, it is anchored in the here and now, seeking release from opinion, prejudice and abstract ideas, seeing clearly the truth of the moment.

This may sound distressingly high-minded and abstract, but Petit said practicing the art of attending to the present has immediate applications in daily life.

“It is practice in being fully present when you need to be,” she said. “With your children or in your work – to feel the truth of the moment before you, this moment.”

A therapist and psychiatric nurse in her day job, Petit is also an ordained Buddhist minister. A student of Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn and the Kwan Um School of Zen, she established the Penobscot Area Zen Group in the spring of 1998, a few months after moving to Maine to be closer to her grown children.

The center is at her home on Pushaw Lake, the living room – spartan and spotlessly clean – given over to meditation practice. The spacious, many-windowed room has no furniture and the feel of a sacred space, but Petit said her grandchildren have a fine time sliding on the slippery floors when they visit.

And though the “sittings” are rich with the traditional language, artifacts and rituals of Buddhism, Petit is quick to point out that Zen, though strongly associated with Buddhism, it is not, itself, a religion. “There’s no barrier to this practice,” she said. “There are people from all religions, and from no religion, who practice Zen meditation. There is no conflict.”

Again – what is the sound of 12 people chanting?

It’s a good bet the snowy woods of Burnham have not often witnessed a sight like this: a dozen bulkily clad adults trudging single file though the pines, beating on drums and bells, chanting in a droning unison Kwan Se-um Bo-sal, Kwan Se-um Bo-sal, invoking over and over the name of the Bodhisattva of Compassion.

On a recent Saturday, several Bangor-area members carpooled down to a rambling old farmhouse to meet up with some folks from the Northern Light Zen Center in Brunswick. In a remote setting in Burnham, they gathered for a noisy midwinter kido – “energy way” – chanting retreat.

Group chanting is just another form of meditation, said Colin Fay of Brunswick, one that eliminates the “I” and creates a focused, collective energy. Most Zen meditation, including the silent sittings in Orono, begins with brief group chanting, in Korean and in English. (Chants make reference to Buddhist traditions and beliefs, but, Fay said, “It could be anything. You could chant ‘Coca-Cola’ or count to 10 over and over and it would accomplish the same thing.”)

But kido chanting is loud, long and rhythmic. Percussion instruments ramp up the noise level, which is one reason the group chose a secluded spot in Burnham, a small Waldo County town. Because the retreat was daylong, the sittings were broken up with periods of walking meditation. And because the day was unusually warm for this winter, the Burnham chanters took their energy out into the sunlit world.

Which, after all, is the point. By identifying their essential selves, their oneness with each other and the universe, through achieving “clear mind,” “one mind” or “don’t-know mind” – the terms are used interchangeably – Zen practitioners seek, ultimately, to heal a world of hurt.

“If someone is before you hungry, you just feed them,” explained one Brunswick participant. “If they’re thirsty, you get them a drink of water. If they’re hurt, you take care of them.”

The focused energy gathered together, then released at the Saturday kido, was dedicated to the cause of global peace.

Late winter marks a period in Zen tradition called kyol che, a time for intensified meditation and practice. Through April 4, the Penobscot Area Zen Center will be available for individual sitting four nights a week in addition to the regularly scheduled Tuesday night group meditation. There is also a schedule of one-day retreats for the coming year. For information, call Marilynne Petit at 262-9362.