Rediscovering Natalie Goldberg
This week I rediscovered the writer, Natalie Goldberg.
How elegantly she writes as she takes the reader through her childhood, her early days of not being the well-known writer and teacher she is now, but a wannabe. Not well-known or a teacher, but a writer.
How could she feel as out of place as she says she did, I wonder. She may think she was the only student feeling out of place. If her classmates shared their innermost thoughts during those times, she may discover they felt as lost as she did. Chopped liver sandwiches may have separated her from her friends’ noses but perhaps the girl with the over permed hair envied Natalie her shiny, straight, dark brown locks. We will never know.
Haven’t we all felt lost much of our lives, making it up one day at a time, feeling as if we were further behind than we were yesterday? Goldberg thinks the feelings of loneliness and angst, therefore, the increased interest in writing, is an American cultural phenomena. She could be too hard on the Americans. Maybe not.
Goldberg has traveled abroad but I’m unsure how extensively. Perhaps if she lived extensively, alone in other countries, without benefit of a retreat community, especially Asian or Latin American locations, she would have discovered that it’s a human condition that makes us feel apart. Makes us feel as if we are the only ones whose mom and dad were unlike other parents. Having no parents at all. Made us think we were uglier, weaker, dumber than others. Without translated literature or the ability, by knowing the language, to communicate at a soulful level in other languages, we rarely know what other country’s peoples feel.
Friends from former Soviet Union countries have shared their feelings of difference within their classrooms, homes. Chinese associates have told of unexplainable experiences they felt they could share with few, wrestling with disapproving ancestors as well as contemporaries. Perhaps all they needed was a right set of writing prompts from their native equivalent Natalie Goldberg and they could have shared experiences similar to hers.
I recall following Goldberg, two workshop participants behind her and nine following me, as silently, hands at our waists, we walked through Carmel’s side streets. Pines towering above us, under an overcast sky, a few tourists and locals watched as our line of a dozen or so arrived, passed by, and moved on down the street, leaving them to stare. Who were those walkers? Why were they walking in a row? Who was their leader? Why did they not talk, looking straight ahead? Now somewhere, do any of them think of that day when they saw that unknown group pass by? Did they run to Google to discover what walking meditation meant?
In the Zen center classroom that Saturday, Goldberg sat wearing her rakusu, on the edge of her chair, her posture leaning into the class. If she leaned closer to us as she spoke softly, gently, enunciating clearly each word, maybe we would grasp her teaching sooner.
I sat on the front row, only a few feet from her right. I couldn’t speak to her. What if, in return, she spoke to me? Could she see inside me, know how hollow I was, how in partial awe I was of her and her work?
I recall nothing she said that day. Her essence I have never forgotten.
Let the Whole World Come Thundering Home, her 2018 memoir about her cancer experience, I did not want to read. I will not. I did not want to ponder that she is one more person from whom I have learned, loved at a distance, who will too soon depart this life. Yes, she and the others may be ready to move onward to their next major experiences but I am not ready for that. I need them too much in this lifetime. My lifetime.
When Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World, was published, I did not want to read that one either. How could she abandon writing? Was writing not hard enough, not rewarding enough? Did she not know we wannabees needed more from her, energy that surely her painting took from us, yet gave us little in return? Of course, she was not abandoning writing, she was only learning more and augmenting and honing those writing skills.
I wanted to read and hear more about how she disciplined herself to sit not hour by hour but minute by minute, moving her arms, hands, fingers across the pages. I wanted to know how she dealt with daily, even hourly interruptions, yet she produced. How she blended her physical life with her mental, her emotional, her spiritual life. How she might have watched a wasp on a Peruvian apple cactus inhale, flit away, deposit productive energy in another location.
What do I think she would say if she were beside me, now my having the courage to ask her a question? Breathing, she’d say. Breathing. Keep breathing. Focus on the breath.
I write each day. I cannot keep from doing it. I breathe each day but not in the way that Goldberg or any other Zen or meditation teacher would instruct. That’s even harder than writing is some days. The rewards? There may be none for either the writing or the breathing. I accept that about the writing, perhaps less so about the breathing.
As I write this, the cleaner is downstairs, mopping the floor, a task I can hardly imagine doing with any level of competence. Until I wrote this last sentence, I had forgotten that I used to have a mop and a bucket, trying to keep my kitchen floor clean. I hated doing it and I did a dreadful job. Never could I get the water out of the mop or the dirty water away from the clean dry areas.
Could the cleaner write? I do not know but probably, si. Could she breathe? Most likely, with guidance, she could. If we had stronger language skills, we could share stories. We could tell one another of our lives and probably conclude we were more alike than we thought we were.
Like with Goldberg, we may never remember the words we exchanged but we may recall our essences.
