And Taos was also the same: There was the land, the golden light, the ecstatic experience of being brought into the moment with that huge sky behind you, the sacred mountain of Taos ever present on the landscape. There was absolutely no place else to be but where you were, watching that hummingbird feed on the pink hollyhock in front of you. Yes, this was still the best place. But I had left. I had met Katagiri Roshi, and now I was back, alone, carrying his practice with me.
I moved on after a month to stay with my friend Rob in Albuquerque, and while I was there I worked on Writing Down the Bones, which I had started a few months earlier in Minnesota. Each morning before I began to write, I walked along the irrigation ditch in the south valley of Albuquerque. The Sandias were in the distance to my left, in a blue-purple haze, and close up all around me were snarling, black dogs behind fences that also held old pickups, rundown adobe houses, chickens pecking at nails and pigweed, horses, goats, tires, and old bottles. I loved those walks, the pale soft yellow earth, the surprising rush of water, the delicate green of willows. I thought of that mile stretch along the ditch as one of my angel places. I felt good there, glad to be in New Mexico again near Twitty’s Rib Hut and Consuelo’s Chiles Rellenos.
After that month in Albuquerque, I settled in Santa Fe. It was the place I had the least attachment or connection with and so it seemed the least haunted by the past. I rented an adobe on Don Cubero Street.
“Make writing your practice,” Roshi had told me.
“Oh, no, I can’t. My brain,” I pointed to my head, “I can’t shut it up.”
“If you commit to it, writing will take you as deep as Zen,” he told me.
I settled into writing in Santa Fe. Sitting meditation seemed to fade away. Everything about my years in Minnesota fell away, except my relationship with Roshi. I hardly remembered the cold, the gray sky, the thunderous Mississippi, not because Minnesota hadn’t been a deep time for me, but because I was so happy to be back in New Mexico, where I belonged. I do remember one day after being back several months, I suddenly ached for a white clapboard house on the corner of Emerson and Thirty-second. I’d never been in that house; I’d hardly noticed it, but it was on my route to the food coop and the zendo and it was catty-corner to the mailbox. I must have taken it in on a body level, and later after I left Minneapolis I spent a whole afternoon oddly aching for it, a symbol to me of the Midwest, plain clean lines, a second story, on a block with a square lawn, a wooden porch—different from the sage and rambling adobe of the Southwest.
I had never spoken about New Mexico in Minnesota, and now I didn’t know how to explain my experience in the zendo—all that formal sitting—to my old friends in New Mexico. What could I say? I sat a lot. Yeah, so what did you learn? my friend would ask. We would be walking in an arroyo behind St. John’s. The sky was turquoise; the earth, shades of pink; and there was red rock dotted with piñons. I don’t know, I’d say. And I’d shake my head. It was all in me. It was nothing I could tell about. I did not learn computer programming or aerodynamics in the zendo. I wasn’t sure yet how to apply it to my world. I was still working to digest it.
The only place in Santa Fe I felt comfortable writing in was The Haven, on Canyon Road. That was odd for me. Usually I could write any place, and The Haven was a bit high-priced, not a café, really, where you could just order tea, but more a full-meal restaurant with linen napkins. Yet, when I opened my notebook there, I was content to write Bones, to tell about writing practice, to share what Roshi had taught me. I was afraid to write the book, afraid that after divulging the deepest ways I saw writing and the world, everyone would laugh at me, so if I felt good at The Haven, I didn’t question it. I went there often, ordered their cheapest lunch, and sat at the table near the window. I’d think to myself as I wrote, no one in Santa Fe knows Roshi. I’m alone here in this writing.
After I’d been going to The Haven for several weeks, the owner came up to me.
“Hi. I see you write here often. What are you writing?”
“Oh, a book about using writing as a practice, like Zen practice,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, I’m a Zen student. I study with Baker Roshi at the Cerro Gordo zendo,” she said.
“You do?” I asked, incredulous. “You must know Katagiri then. He’s my teacher.”
“Of course I do.” She sat down at my table. She’d sat sesshin with Katagiri many times when he was in San Francisco. She then proceeded to tell me about her recent trip to Japan and how she had visited Dogen’s ashes at his monastery, Eiheiji. She turned her head. “You know, most of the cooks and waiters here are Zen students.”
“You’re kidding.”
She nodded her head. “Hey, Robert, come over.” She pointed to me. “She studied with Katagiri.” Then she turned back to me. “Oh, come and write any time. You’re welcome here.”
I was delighted. No wonder I felt good about writing my book here. My instincts were strong. I had found a safe place.
In the spring, I began working at The Haven as a part-time cook. I needed the money and I was having a hard time with the writing of Bones. I had suddenly become very afraid of failure—and just as afraid of success. I watched myself avoid the notebook as if it were a plague. Getting a job will be a good thing, I thought to myself. I became the dessert cook. I marveled over my chocolate mousses, chocolate cakes. I licked my fingers often. Chocolate became the basic ingredient in all the desserts except the flan. For two months, I enjoyed the job, my coworkers, the new activity. Then I became tired of it. What am I doing with my life? I’d ask. What about the book?
I’d just broken up with a boyfriend I dated for six months. After only two weeks, he’d already found someone else. It made me mad.
“But you didn’t want to be with him,” my friends kept saying.
“I know,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter. How could he find someone so quickly?”
One night at my most depressed the phone rang as I iced a cake. I picked it up. “The Haven—can I help you?”
It was my friend Janet in Albuquerque. I was surprised. “Listen, Nat, a bunch of us are going down to the jazz festival in New Orleans. We have an extra ticket. Why don’t you come? It will cheer you up. You’ve been so down.”
“I can’t afford it,” I said. “I have a book to write.” Meanwhile, I wasn’t writing. It felt like a term paper due in school that I had hanging over my head. It wasn’t that the writing was hard. I was afraid to complete it, to finish it.
Janet insisted. “Oh, come on, Nat. We’ll have a great time.”
“Okay, I’ll do it,” I said and hung up, looking for people in the kitchen who would substitute for me for that week.
I drove down to Albuquerque that Thursday. We were all going to meet at Rob’s—there were six of us. I was an hour early. I decided I’d take a walk along the ditch where I’d been a year earlier. I walked for ten minutes, felt the soft earth beneath my shoes. Suddenly I began to shake and fell down crying, my face right down there in the dirt. “You’ve got to finish that book. You’ve got to finish that book,” an inner voice cried. I pounded my fist on the ground. “You’ve got to do it for Roshi, for all he gave you. I don’t care if you’re afraid. Finish it.” I wept and wept as those fierce black dogs behind their fences growled and barked.
When I got up, I brushed myself off. There was resolve in my body as I walked back to Rob’s.
We flew to Louisiana, and during the whole music festival I sat in the gospel tent, right up close to the stage. I couldn’t believe the sound coming out of those Christian women, how a chest could be that big and open, and how huge a voice it could produce.
When I returned home, I quit cooking at The Haven; I quit everything else I was doing. I wrote seven days a week for seven weeks, rarely leaving that little adobe on Don Cubero. I moved through the book. No resistance, no thought; I just kept writing. I pulled the last page from my typewriter on a Sunday evening and knew it was finished.
During the time I was struggli
ng with Bones, I taught writing workshops in my living room. I knew most people in Santa Fe hadn’t known anyone like Roshi and I was surprised, though the town was a New Age mecca, how few people had sat meditation. I realized zazen was an old-fashioned kind of thing and hard. Simple things my students in my writing classes did not know. I told them to ground themselves in detail. They argued with me. They wanted to write about the cosmic world. I said, “Give me the details of drinking a cup of mint tea. That’s cosmic enough.” I told them to continue whether it was hard or easy. Often they said no and drifted to other things. I made up a motto for them—“With your feet in the clouds and your head on the ground.”
I took a so-called New Age workshop in my first year back. Its advertisement said, “You want to go fast. You’re unlimited.” Well, it sounded good, but then I stopped to think: We’re all exhausted from going fast. Who’s unlimited? I’m not. I’ll die someday. I’m in a human body. When I stopped to argue this with a group member, she said, “Well, the psyche grows fast.” No, it doesn’t, I thought. Look at history. We are dumb and slow; the sins of the fathers and mothers are carried on by the children, and only through our willingness to slow down and examine can we feel the effects of alcoholism, incest, rage, hatred, greed, and lumberingly change our behavior.
That statement that the psyche grows fast was unrooted, wasn’t connected with the earth. A tree has a growth spurt, but it is grounded by the depth of its roots. That New Age workshop borrowed from Zen, from religion; I heard watered-down statements that were directly out of Buddhism, but they were empty of the spiritual connection. Something smart from religion was taken for the sake of self-aggrandizement and pleasure. I worried about my Santa Fe writing students, thinking that one moment they’d take a writing workshop and the next moment they’d go on to Rolfing as a way to save themselves. No practice was taught at that workshop. By the end of the weekend, everyone was salivating, drooling with their own ecstasy, but by Monday or Tuesday morning they were flat out, deflated, depressed. They had no way of integrating what they had learned and no way of maintaining it—except, of course, by signing up for another high-cost weekend.
I told my writing students that practice is something done under all circumstances, whether you’re happy or sad. You don’t become tossed away by a high weekend or a blue Monday. It is something close to you, not dependent on high-tech gyrations or smooth workshop-leader talk. Writing is something you do quietly, regularly, and in doing it, you face your life; everything comes up to fight, resist, deny, cajole you. Practice is old-fashioned, not hip or glamorous, but it gets you through Monday, and it lets you see the ungroundedness of hyped-up New Age workshops or quick ways to write a best-selling novel that you end up never writing.
After I had been in Santa Fe a year, I went back to visit Minneapolis and I made an appointment to see Roshi. I brought him an Acoma Pueblo pot. I wanted him to have something of New Mexico. It was hand-done, smooth, brown and white, with a black line design on it. I loved Acoma. The old pueblo was built on top of a mesa and was called Sky City.
I walked into Roshi’s study. There he was, softer, kinder than I remembered him. It was summer. He wore a white tee-shirt, and I noticed the skin at the base of his neck had gathered a little. He was growing older.
“Roshi, they’re crazy in Santa Fe. I need a teacher again.” I was afraid I’d soon be gobbled up by Santa Fe, seduced into a hundred different things: aura balancing, shamanic journeys, crystal readings, rebirthings, past-life regressions. I needed a teacher to keep me on the path.
“Don’t be so greedy,” he said when I told him I wanted a teacher. “Writing is taking you deep.” He tapped the Bones manuscript I brought to show him. “Keep writing. You can write or visit me, if you need to.”
No teacher? That was too lonely. Out there alone with my writing? Then he told me, “Anything you do deeply is lonely. Even the Zen students here,” he said, “the ones who are going deep are very lonely.”
I nodded. I understood, though I didn’t want to. It was up to me now, and it was true that the writing of Bones had taken me deep. In the act of writing, alone at my old oak dining room table on Don Cubero Street, I had begun to close the gap between what Roshi was saying all those years and my own understanding of it. Writing was the vehicle for making the teachings mine, for knitting them close to me.
When Bones was published a year later, a Zen monk, Steve Hagen, who knew me all those years in Minnesota and who read it, asked me in amazement, “Did you know all this stuff when you were practicing here?”
I smiled. I knew I had been quite a misbehaved student. “No,” I said. “Writing taught it to me.”
When I returned to Santa Fe after visiting Roshi, an acquaintance asked, “What did you do up there?”
“I gave a reading,” I said.
“Astrological?” she inquired.
“No, poetry,” I answered.
Once I went to Roshi when I lived in Minnesota and told him, “When I’m at Zen Center, I feel like a writer. When I’m with writers, I feel like a Zen student.”
“Someday you will have to choose. You’re not ready yet, but someday you will be. Writing and Zen are parallel paths, but not the same.”
We never spoke about it again. I continued to write; I continued to sit.
Three months after I finished Bones, I went camping alone one weekend in August by the Chama River. I wondered why I insisted on going alone, since I’d just met a man I really liked in Santa Fe. The whole weekend I anticipated some vision or epiphany I was supposed to have. I woke Sunday morning to the loud gallop of deer hooves inches from my head. I’d slept out in a sleeping bag on the ground, no tent, and the deer were heading for the river. There must have been fourteen of them. I’d never seen them from that angle before: black hooves, beige bodies. Mostly I was panicked. By the time I sat up, I saw the last of them crashing through the willows at the Chama’s edge.
I thought, this must be it, the epiphany: I was almost trampled to death. I can leave now. I made a breakfast of brown rice and roasted nuts over a fire and then packed up. I had to drive eleven miles on winding, rutted dirt roads before I hit the blacktop. Pink cliffs shot up from the dry desert to my left and the Chama River and its valley spread out to my right.
I’d gone about three miles when suddenly I burst out crying. At the same instant, my blue Rabbit, which had never done this before, overheated, and steam shot up with great force from the hood of the car. I cried; it steamed. I repeated over and over: “I chose being a writer. I chose being a writer,” and sobbed and sobbed. Before that moment I had no idea that that question had been working in me so deeply. Though I had written a book and talked about writing practice, I still never consciously considered myself a writer rather than a Zen student.
That talk with Roshi had occurred maybe six years earlier. I had forgotten it, but beings seen and unseen and our wild minds continue to work while we are busy apparently only shaking salt on our french fries. I felt a great relief after that morning by the Chama. I drove back to Santa Fe, stopping in Tesuque for a wonderful meal all by myself at El Nido’s.
Why did I have to choose? I don’t know if we do really choose. Eventually, I think, something chooses us and we shut up, surrender, and go with it. And the difference between Zen and writing? In writing you bring everything you know into writing. In Zen you bring everything you know into nothing, into the present moment where you can’t hold on to anything.
It’s a great challenge to write about a place you lived in while you are still living in it, to have perspective on it. It’s not impossible. It’s been done and done beautifully. After all, it is only in the last century that we’ve had such freedom of travel and movement. And I imagine if we don’t change place, time is always changing anyway, so we are always looking back over our shoulder at the past, something that is no longer here, as we write.
But not being in the close physical vicinity of Roshi, not meeting my own resistances head on, having th
e distance and time, my appreciation for Roshi deepened, flowered. I was no longer doing my work, my books, my writing workshops; I was doing his work, our books; I was teaching writing to help all sentient beings. I was teaching it the way he taught me Zen. He inspired me, gave me a vision of a way to be.
Sometimes at the beginning of a writing workshop, I’d look out at my students and think, Oh, no, I don’t want to start again, all over, another group. I’ve been doing this for years. Then I’d think, did Roshi not put up with you, no, not “put up with,” treat you like a Buddha consistently under all circumstances? Yes, I’d nod. Well, get out there, I’d say, and I’d begin my class with gratitude.
Once over tea with a friend in Santa Fe—it was November, the month was important, the branches were bare, a few birds darted past the window, I wore sweaters one over another, and the wood stove was crackling—I held the teacup in both my hands, and I remembered something. I began to tell my friend who was sitting there with me:
“You know, in Minnesota sometimes it can be this cold in early October.” I paused. “Once I was on the Zen center’s land in southeastern Minnesota, near New Albin, Iowa. We planned to build a permanent monastery there eventually, but at the time we sat a weekend sesshin in a big army tent. It was after lunch, we had work period and we all lined up and the work leader announced who would be doing what job. He said, ‘Natalie and—I don’t remember who the other person was—go over and carry the wood from up the hill down to the creek.’ We were in silence. You didn’t say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do that,’ you just did it. It was part of the training. So we went up and there were these huge tree trunks that had been cut down.” I stood up in the kitchen and showed her how long the trunks were. “From here”—I paced the distance from the side cupboard door to the living room—“to here. And they were this big around.” I showed her with my arms two and a half feet.