The Writing Life Too

I didn’t sleep well last night so instead of tossing around in bed, listening to the radio, here I am again, writing as dawn arrives, the sky the palest of blues. I wanted to say something in this blog about Friday night when I went Powells to join the throng listening to Natalie Goldberg read from her new book Old Friend From Far Away: The Practice Of Writing Memoir and answer questions from the crowd. Her new book is based on the idea that in order to write a memoir we must first know how to remember. It’s filled with writing exercises that prod the memory, short chapters, and Zen wisdom. If you’re not familiar with Goldberg, she wrote Writing Down the Bones, one of the first books that talked about writing practice and Zen and the book sold over a million copies. Goldberg and Peter Elbow first encouraged people to use writing practice, simply sitting and writing quickly without judging the outcome, as the way into writing. The thing with Goldberg is that she makes writing seem possible and deepening and exhilarating.

And while I’ve followed her career, listening to her on Friday night I discovered that I’d missed some key happenings and knowledge. First, I hadn’t realized that she was a poet for 15 years before she wrote Bones, and for those 15 years she couldn’t get her poems published. I’d read her first memoir Long Quiet Highway years ago but hadn’t read The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to the Truth where she came to terms with her relationships with her father and her Zen teacher Dainin Katagiri Roshi. Friday night she talked about how the truths she wrote about Roshi has caused her to lose the Zen community that has been her home for many years.

So she talked about being okay with pain and loss, to feel your way through it, to be gentle with yourself, and admitted that she spent months recovering from this sharp grief. Afterward I stood in a long line to have a book signed for a friend because she’s afraid to write and I’m giving it to her later today as a birthday gift. And I greeted Goldberg because we’d met ten years ago at a smaller bookstore signing here in Portland and because she was a guest author when I taught on-line at iVillage.com when I interviewed her twice. During that on-line visit she offered three of Roshi’s teachings that have been posted on my desk since: Continue under all circumstances. Make positive efforts to the good. Don’t be tossed away.

Also during that on-line visit one of my writing students asked her what to do about fear and she answered. “I just let it be. I keep my hand moving.”

So I was thinking about her life and her beliefs about fear, failure, and grief when I was teaching a workshop yesterday. It was one of those days when getting my ideas to my students seemed especially difficult and it kept feeling like we couldn’t connect. Then we spent the final hours making collages together with music playing in the background. The idea of the collage was to represent a vision for the life we want to live along with core values. And in the final minutes of the class we lined them up along a wall and walked around looking at them like paintings in a gallery. And they were so beautiful and alive and rich that something inside me shifted and the difficult day seemed not so hard.

I arrived home, planning on spending a quiet night because I’m still getting over a cold and started cooking dinner. I checked my phone messages and discovered that one of my friends had died. I called the woman delivering this news and we talked for a long time about our mutual friend, Cathy and the past. About six years ago after going through several crises and losing her father, she had become increasingly paranoid, delusional, and was suffering from serious health problems. The last time I saw her she looked like she was dying. I tried to talk to her about getting medical help, but she wasn’t one to take advice.

So I called the medical professionals in her life and her old friends and reported to them about her seriously elevated heart rate and some other facts, trying to stage an intervention, trying to save her life. I sent her an email explaining what I’d done and she cut off our friendship and I hadn’t seen her since. Now, six years later she is dead from these health problems including heart disease.

After absorbing this news, I ate dinner and was reading on my couch when Toni, another of her old friends called and we talked for about an hour about all that had gone down, about times past and our memories of Cathy, and I learned that in the past few years she’d suffered horribly. And that as I feared, her health problems and early death were unnecessary. I spent more time on the phone with my daughter and then with music in the background curled on my couch and followed the pain like I was hobbling down an old, familiar road, one that carried me to my childhood. I just let it wash over me, surrendering. I recalled how that morning before my workshop I had been thinking about Cathy and Toni and now Cathy was dead. I thought about another friend Barbara who had died too young about a year ago, about my aunts, both dead in their fifties.

My eyes kept wandering to the collage I’d just made and all the images and words, messages to my subconscious. I believe that what writing and life can teach us is that pain doesn’t need to be avoided. That you can nestle there with it and really feel and let it enter you. Because when you avoid it, or block it, or push it away, it just returns. And festers. During the question and answer session on Friday night a man asked Goldberg what she loved about Zen. And in an odd voice with hands pressed together, she intoned “Awaken. Awaken. Do not waste your precious life.”