Librodidact

800 words | 5 min read

“Writing,” says Natalie Goldberg, “is an athletic activity.”

She sits on a chair against a mud and straw wall, hands resting on her knees, a knowing smile encompassing the zendo. I can feel it through the screen, across the distance of 1,614 miles.

We all nod and shake our hands at the wrist. I never considered writing an athletic activity, but after three exercises, my hand and brain are in firm agreement with her.

It is Sunday, and we are with Natalie at the Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe for a meditation and writing workshop. “Maybe I’ll drive over for the day,” I joked with my husband the night before. “It can’t be that far from Florida to New Mexico.”

I watch the Zoom screen as we all bend to our work. As usual, I’m the unrepentant soul with one eye open, watching the feast at the table instead instead of surrendering to grace. This must be what a buddha sees, I think, surveying the top of everyone’s head.

There is a special perfume that rises from a chorós of minds working together, even over a great distance. It’s infectious, and I find myself wishing I could do this every Sunday. Pour my spirit through a pen, and listen to the songs of my fellows.

We write and then we listen. We listen to Natalie, but more importantly, we listen to each other.

“Ninety percent of writing is receiving, listening,” she says. “Read aloud! And listen.”

I discover how terrible I am at listening without a pen in my hand. After an excerpt read by Natalie from House Made of Dawn, she asks us to write down anything we can recall, and I’m blank. The crab of my brain scuttles sideways and into a hole.

So when my reading partner tells me her story, I listen with my whole body.

It’s hard, because when we really listen, we become vulnerable. She describes feeding jello to her dying father, and without the defense of unlistening, I’m a mess. I hear her story, I receive it. I share the suffering behind her words.

Our time is up, and there isn’t any left for me to read my writing, but I’m secretly relieved. My throat is an impassible road, closed by the truth waiting behind it.

Who’d have thought jello could summon a host of furies? Seemingly innocuous things are full of potent magic.

“Do you see why reading out loud is so important?” Natalie asks when we return to the group. “The more you can accept the writing of others, the more you can accept your own writing. The more you accept others, the more you can accept yourself.”

I write this in my notebook, mark it with giant hearts and stars. You can accept yourself.

Another student reads her prompt aloud. “You wouldn’t think it, but jello hurts, it stings….And you don’t want it in your mouth.”

It’s delightful and unexpected, a story of women wrestling in jello. She gifts us another truth for the day: that contrast and juxtaposition are powerful tools in our craft, creating a mental image your reader will never forget because you’ve subverted their expectations.

I say jello, you say lesbian wrestling.

Natalie’s book Writing Down the Bones was my gateway into conscious writing. A beloved teacher gave it to me, but it sat on my bookshelf for decades until I read it during a family vacation. By the light of a candle, and with my infant son sleeping in my arms, I filled page page page. I didn’t think. I wrote.

“Lose control,” she tells us. On the screen, a hundred heads nod.

For once, I don’t experience the cognitive dissonance of comparing a writer with their work. It’s unfair to objectify her, but she’s the master I hoped for. She’s funny, sharp, and earthy. “I think I was in the Japanese army,” she jokes, rubbing her black-socked feet in memory, probably thinking of cold mornings and numb toes in the zendo. “We went barefoot all the time, everywhere.”

Fierce joy is stamped into her face–the joy that comes from accepting that none of this, not one sliver, lasts forever. It’s not bliss, not really even joy, but acceptance. And within that acceptance, freedom.

And this was the greatest gift she gave me during our class, the idea I have stamped into my mind-heart-hand. Acceptance.

“Follow the path that’s scary, that’s where the energy is. Can you write deeply and have your own pleasure from it? Can you accept yourself? Trust your voice, and trust yourself. It’s the only way you can write.”

☼

Featured Image: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, pencil and black chalk on paper, 20 3/4 x 14 1/2 in., New York, Dahesh Museum of Art. Wiki page and full artwork.