Every Wednesday at Plum Village, we had Lazy Day, a whole day to completely relax. On one Wednesday near the end of the month, my friend Jim and I did walking meditation on a small country road to a French town six miles away. We stopped and watched a machine attached to a tractor collect hay in a field and then emit it out the back as a golden roll, like a fresh loaf of bread. We were so slowed down by the time we reached the village that we sat down on a stone bench in a church courtyard for a long time, watching a bee in a red rose, and felt, yes, this was enough. This was everything.
On the way back we munched a dark chocolate called Noire, meaning “black” in English, which was seventy percent cocoa.
“Stop, Jim,” I said as we headed back, and we sat for a half hour by a pond, watching a swan glide across the water.
One day in the last week, at six A.M. twenty of us had tea with Thay in the zendo. At last, I thought, I’ll get to ask my question. Linden tea, dried from the tree outside, was served, and cookies were passed around. They asked us, “How do you connect with community?” and we began to his left, each person taking a turn for a few minutes to answer his question. I was the fourteenth to go. I stepped right through protocol. I did not answer his question. This was my only chance to ask him.
“Thay,” I said, “my teacher, Katagiri Roshi, died four months ago. I studied with him for twelve years. I miss him very much.” I paused. My voice cracked. “Where can I find my teacher now?”
“I knew Katagiri,” he said. “He was a great man. For two summers, I invited him to Plum Village. He could not make it.” He nodded his head. “He made it here this summer. You can find him here. In the trees. In the birds. He’s here now.”
I nodded. “Thank you,” I said. I looked down. We went on to the next person. I took a sip of tea. I knew what he said was right, but I also knew I was not ready for it. I wanted the man, the human being. I wasn’t ready to let go.
I did find him again, eight months later.
Heartsick over the Gulf War, I’d wake up in the mornings crying, and I’d think to myself, what do I know about peace? I had a lover then, and we fought all the time. We were waging our own private war and if it wasn’t the two of us, there were many times a day when I’d feel aggression or anger or desire about one thing or another. And now here it was on a large scale. We were destroying a country.
After the war had been going on for two weeks, I woke up one morning and said, “Okay, Nat, what are you gonna do? Think! What can you do? You’ve had all those years of practice, what are you going to do? Pick one thing and do it under all circumstances, like Roshi taught you.”
I made a sign with the help of a friend: Sitting for Peace in the Middle hast. Please join us. Every noon to twelve-thirty, weekdays. It was nonpartisan. I didn’t say someone was good or bad, right or wrong. We were sitting for peace. No one could argue with peace. I made the sign on a Saturday. That Monday, I would begin. A young writer, Rob Wilder, whom I’d met a few weeks before, heard about it and said he’d like to join me.
On that Monday, he met me at 11:30 at the Galisteo Newsstand, where I was writing. Together we walked over to the Santa Fe World Travel Agency. The women there were my travel agents and they had generously given me permission to leave the sign, which was large and cumbersome, nailed to a long pole, and my meditation zafu and zabuton there every day in their basement, so we could easily pick them up and walk the half block to the plaza, which was in the center of downtown Santa Fe. I carried the sign, Rob carried the black cushions, and we walked slowly down the sidewalk. Some pedestrians turned their heads. A teenager gave us the peace sign.
We came to the corner and crossed the street. The plaza has a center, and then radiating out from that are sections of grass and trees flanked by sidewalk. We chose a section with two benches facing each other and cement in between. I placed my zabuton and zafu down on the cement, took off my shoes, bowed to the cushion, and sat down, cross-legged. Rob leaned the sign against the bench and sat down on the bench with his shoulder leaning against the sign to steady it. About four friends joined us and sat on the benches. I took a traveling clock out of my jacket pocket, placed it on the ground, and marked a half hour with it.
It was February. A cold day. It all opened in front of me: all those years of practice. I could sit still under any circumstance. I felt the steadiness of that zazen position, the power of that foundation. I thought if some madman came by and kicked me in the teeth, I would not budge and it was not from willpower. It was from the magnitude of the simple sitting position I took and all the years of practice echoing at my back. I was amazed. I’d learned how to do something in that zendo. What? To do nothing with no ripples, causing no trouble. To sit still. And I felt everything backing me: the trees, the birds, the sky.
In front of me, I could see the dry, yellow winter grass and pigeons, fat ones, pecking at seeds that bypassers threw. The pigeons were beautiful, gray and white, orange, yellow. I breathed in and out. The shadows of bare branches crossed in front of us and bent over us. They moved from my left to my right, but slowly, ever so slowly, marking the sun’s movement. We were all connected from way out there in the solar system to here where my foot was getting cold.
The clock said half past twelve. I bowed and said, “May all beings be peaceful,” and stretched out my legs. People stirred on the two benches. Rob and I carried the sign and cushions back to the travel agency. The women at the agency were eager to know how it went. The first day was finished, Monday, February fourth.
I couldn’t have imagined how hard it would be to commit myself to one thin sliver of a half hour in the middle of the day. I changed airplane flights so I would leave after twelve-thirty on Fridays, and returned early Monday morning to make the sitting at noon, after driving the hour from the airport in Albuquerque. I had to rearrange my life.
One day I was in the middle of negotiations with my realtor for a house I was buying. I was excited. I’d been looking for a house for a year and a half and I thought I had one. I looked at my clock: ten minutes to noon. It was hard to tear myself away. Oh, maybe I could just skip today. What does it matter? Few people join us. Go, Nat, said another voice. Go. In a split second, I turned, took a deep breath, felt a little foolish when I said, “Joan, I’m sorry, I have to go sit for peace in the plaza. I’ll meet you again at one,” and I dashed off, skidding to the zafu at noon. Rob had already picked it up with the sign. He had never sat prior to the plaza sittings but his commitment was true. I got in position and we sat. It rained that noon, hard. Rob and I were the only ones there. No pigeons, no casual passersby. I watched the rain hit the sidewalk and bounce. My hair was sopping wet, so was my jacket. I was happy to be there, that beautiful, peaceful half hour in the middle of the day. “Make positive effort for the good,” Roshi told me after my divorce. Every day Rob and I were doing that. No matter how crazy I felt in the morning, stirred by the last night’s dream or my morning’s writing, everything turned when I sat on that zafu outside under trees and sky. I watched how big time was: A half hour was tremendous. How long it took—I could hear the shoe steps—for a person to walk from the statue to the street, across my path. How enormous the rain was with its small hands.
When I met Joan, the realtor, at one, she said, “You know, while you sat, I went and had a bowl of soup. I never stop in the middle of my day to eat. It was really nice. Thanks.” We both smiled.
There were days when one or two of the Santa Fe crazies who hang out on the plaza joined us. One sat next to Rob with a big boom box on his lap blasting, “I left my Chevy on the levee,” and trying to talk to me. I sat still. Should I say something? In a moment, I turned to him: “We’re silent now. Later we’ll talk.” I turned my head back. He sat a few moments more and then wandered off. One man sat still for ten minutes, said, “Man, I can’t do this any longer,” left, and returned at the end for five minutes. Two tourists, who didn’t know each other, sat down at 12:05. The woman from New York began a discussion about peace w
ith the man. She gave her precise opinion of the Vietnam War. Again I turned: “We can talk later. Please let’s just sit now.”
“Oh, I can’t do that,” and she trailed off. The man scratched his ear and followed her. An old man with a wool hat said one day, “I’ll show you how to get real peace,” and he handed us a photocopied page from the Bible.
Three secretaries brought lunches and sat on a bench across from us and discussed their boss. “Oh, I saw a bottle in his lower left-hand drawer.” They giggled.
Many times Rob and I sat alone. One day it snowed. The pigeons looked beautiful through the white flakes. There was a fat gray one that always seemed to lag behind and miss the thrown popcorn. He scurried to another place and was shut out there, too.
I bought a journal made of recycled paper and bound in black cloth with white Japanese calligraphy on it. It became our sitting journal. Rob and I wrote in it each day:
February 26th, 6 people
Nat, Rob, a college guy, a woman who wanted to talk about peace, not sit for it, Bev and the guy in black, who plays his radio and sang for us. Weird day, full of energy. It was warm and the people came and went and the guy in black sang to us on his bike in front of Nat. I saw Nat almost begin to laugh as he sang. The guy has a picture of a teenage girl on his box.
(Rob)
I got a cold on top of my cold and wasn’t going to sit. Walked to the Galisteo this morning and it was freezing out. Had a great talk with Kate on phone this morning. I feel lost and found. Just trying to hang out in the life I’ve got. I’m good and doing fine.
(Nat)
A photo of us sitting was taken for The Reporter; a German video team taped us one day. Two poems kept going through my head when I sat. One a third-grader in Minneapolis had written years ago:
Chicken and the car won’t go
Spells Chicago
Smells pretty good.
And one by Raymond Carver that I had memorized, the last in his book written when he was dying of cancer:
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
(“Late Fragment” from
A New Path to the Waterfall,
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989)
And one day it seemed to bubble up from the very earth I sat on—I heard Roshi’s words. Words he’d repeated often in his lectures, but that I had paid little attention to before. Now I heard them: “Peace is not a matter of discussion. Shut up and, like the Buddha, sit down under the old tree.” Peace is not something to fight over. I heard his words. I heard them. He was with me again. In my ribs and chest and lungs and face and hair. I carried him in me. He was sitting with me and with the trees and birds. It was so simple.
Yet there was a day in April when I was walking down Palace Avenue in Santa Fe—the war was over, at least officially, it was warm out, I wore a blue cotton dress, I was swinging my arms, happy—when a thought came to me: I sure would like to have tea with Roshi one more time.
I stood at the corner. I was quiet. The thought went through me again. I’d give anything to have tea with him just one more time. Then I stopped: Was I serious?
Well, what would you give? I asked myself. Would you give up your new house in Santa Fe?
I nodded, yes, in a second.
What about your heart’s home on the mesa?
Absolutely. To see Roshi again? For sure.
What about your success?
I’d give that up.
Okay, how about your two published books?
In a snap. I was feeling exuberant. I thought I was going to get to see him.
Now the real test: I asked myself, Natalie, would you give up your writing?
I paused. And got very still. Would you give up your writing? The question fell down through my body.
Yes, to have tea with Roshi one more time, I’d give up my writing. Yes, I’d do that.
I knew it was true. I meant it. I felt a great freedom sweep through me.
Well, then what would you do if you didn’t have writing?
I answered slowly: I’d walk these streets. I’d look at the leaves and the no-leaves in winter. I’d sit still at bus stops and feel my breath entering my body. I’d bow to trees. He’d be with me in sunlight and in the cold blue shadows of winter. I’d have him always in a new way, without doing anything. I’d live like a monk, bringing everything I know into nothing, not holding on to anything.
Couldn’t you do that and be a writer, too?
Maybe so, but at this moment on the corner of Palace Avenue, just having tea seems awfully sweet.
A Biography of Natalie Goldberg
Natalie Goldberg (b. 1948) is a poet, teacher, writer, and painter. She lived in Brooklyn until she was six, when her family moved out to Farmingdale, Long Island. She received a BA in English literature from George Washington University and an MA in humanities from St. John’s University. Her first book, Chicken and in Love, was published in 1980.
She is best known as the author of Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (1986), which revolutionized the teaching and practice of writing in the United States. The book has sold more than one million copies and been translated into fourteen languages.
Goldberg has written numerous books that explore writing as Zen practice, including Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life (1990), Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft (2000), The Essential Writer’s Notebook (2001), The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth (2004), and Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir (2008). She has also published a novel, Banana Rose (1995), and two memoirs, Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America (1993) and The Great Failure: A Bartender, a Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth (2004).
Goldberg has been a Zen practitioner since 1974 and studied with Katagiri Roshi from 1978 until his death in 1990. She began writing and painting soon after beginning these studies. She is ordained in the Order of Interbeing with Thích Nhất Hạnh.
A dedicated instructor, Goldberg has taught writing and literature for more than thirty-five years. She also leads national workshops and retreats attended by people from around the world. The Oprah Winfrey Show sent a film crew to spend the day with Natalie for a segment on spirituality that covered her writing, teaching, painting, and walking meditation.
Goldberg has painted for as long as she has written, and her paintings can be seen in Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World (1997) and Top of My Lungs: Poems and Paintings (2002). Top of My Lungs contains forty poems, twenty of her paintings in color, and an essay, “How Poetry Saved My Life.” Her paintings are on display at the Ernesto Mayans Gallery in Sante Fe, New Mexico, and at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, New Mexico.
In 2006, Goldberg and filmmaker Mary Feidt completed a one-hour documentary, Tangled Up in Bob, about Bob Dylan’s childhood on the Iron Range in northern Minnesota.
Goldberg currently lives in northern New Mexico.
As a child, Natalie watches her grandpa write at the kitchen table. Natalie’s grandparents lived with her throughout her childhood. “They were the sun and the moon to me,” she says.
Natalie (right) at age five, playing outside her house with a friend on Easter Sunday. Natalie lived in Levittown, New York, from birth to kindergarten; soon after, her family moved several miles away to Farmingdale, where she lived until she turned eighteen.
Natalie smiles while posing with her father and sister in front of the family’s summerhouse in Twin Oaks, Long Island. Natalie and her younger sister, Rhoda, spent long afternoons picking wild blackberries that grew over the land.
Natalie age nine, writing while wearing her favorite white buck shoes. At nine, Natalie had no idea that writing would become her great love years later, at age twenty-four.
Natalie’s first real poem, written while she was in her early twent
ies. “It was the first poem where I trusted my own mind,” Natalie says. She first shared it with Rob Strell, the boyfriend with whom she had just broken up.
Natalie is also a prolific painter. Here, some of her very first paintings hangs on the wall behind her.
Natalie’s painting Red Truck in Boulder, 1977. Many of Natalie’s paintings were printed on postcards to celebrate and promote her treasured workshops around New Mexico.
Natalie with her ninety-four-year-old grandma. At the time of this photograph, the author had just returned home from a poetry fellowship in Israel.
Natalie, right, smiles while posing with her very best “writing friend,” Kate Green. “We wrote together every Monday night,” Natalie says.
Natalie in 1984, the year she wrote Writing Down the Bones.
Natalie’s home in New Mexico. From 1986 to 2003, she lived “off the grid,” in a completely solar-powered house made of beer cans and tires.
Natalie’s writing studio, where she wrote from 1993 to 2003. Over the years, her writing schedule has varied but when working on a book, she typically writes from nine in the morning until one in the afternoon.
Natalie and her mother at the beach in 1996. “My mother was beautiful and removed,” Natalie has said. “I took care of her a lot when I was older. I would drag her to the beach with my father, who is a champion swimmer.”
Natalie smiles in her Zen robe alongside a framed photograph of Katagiri Roshi, with whom she trained for twelve years. A student of Zen Buddhism for over twenty-five years, Natalie is ordained in the Order of Interbeing with Thích Nhất Hạnh.
Natalie, center, with filmmaker Mary Feidt and a friend of Bob Dylan’s in Hibbing, Minnesota. In 2004, Natalie traveled to Hibbing to explore Bob Dylan’s hometown and his roots in Feidt’s film Tangled Up in Bob.