Part One
STRUCTURE
Meeting the Mind
BACK IN NINTH-GRADE biology class when Mr. Albert Tint announced that we would study the involuntary organsâthe heart and lungsâhe forgot to mention the mind. My guess is he didnât know about it, but in truth itâs as though the brain were an automatic thought-producing machineâI donât like this dress. Iâm hungry. I miss New York. How did I get so old? I wonder where I put my keys? Did I mail that letter? I need to cut my nails. Next time Iâm going to buy a car with automatic transmission. I hope I didnât bounce my last check. Maybe I should try acupunctureâjust like the popcorn machine in the movie theatre lobby that explodes kernel after kernel.
Whatâs remarkable is that before I sat meditation and tried to focus on my breath when I was twenty-six years old, I didnât know this about my mind: that I couldnât stop it from thinking. I was full of arrogance in my twenties. I thought there was nothing I couldnât do. And then I discovered I wasnât in control.
The first morning of my first retreat I woke earlyâit was still darkâdressed quickly and went to the meditation kiva, a small mud room, on the side of Lama Mountain, seventeen miles north of Taos, New Mexico. The bell rangâwe were to sit still and focus our attention on the breath. What breath? I couldnât find it. Instead I was plunged into a constant yammering. Rushes of thought ran through me. Endless commentary, opinions, ideas, stories. The bell rang a half hour later to signal the end of the period. Wow! I opened my eyes. Who was that wild animal inside me?
It was my own human mind. I needed to understand it. Why? Itâs the writerâs landscape. Imagine that a painter has that wild animal to capture on canvas: arresting its fangs, the raging color of its eyes, the blue of its hump, the flash of its hoofs, the rugged shadow that it casts. We writers have that beast inside us: how we feel, think, hope, dream, perceive. Where do words come from, sentences, ideas? They manifest from our minds. Yikes! Suddenly weâre blasted into a vast jungle, with no maps, no guidelines, no clues. How do we manifest a landscape so full of robust life? What do we say? When thereâs so muchâitâs boundlessâwe usually close down, disconnect, shut up.
Thatâs how I was anyway: confused. I knew my teachers in public school were trying to teach me somethingâmainly, they were good, earnest people. But I couldnât figure out, not even a hint, how a writer wrote. I managed to squeeze out dry little compositions; nothing burst into flame. Carson McCullers, Steinbeck, Joyceâthe writers we studied were a million miles away from me. How did they do it? They might as well have been nuclear scientists. Yet they possessed the same things I did: pen, paper, English language, mind.
My teachers couldnât teach me because they hadnât connected with writingâs essential ingredient: the mind and how it functions. Instead, they taught me how to organize what was outside and around the pulsing lifeblood. I learned to make an outline, but that skeletal plan was built exterior to the heat of creation. Why was this? Western intelligence, preoccupied with thinking, avoided examining the mechanism of thought. Only saints or the insane traveled that interior territory. And what was the result? They cut off their ears, shot themselves, or were burned at the stake. Better not go there. We looked suspiciously on the inner world. It wasnât productive: it could lead only to suffering or turning nutty as a fruitcake. We in the West were better at developing athletes. We knew about bodies.
But then suddenly in the sixties large numbers of young Americans ingested psychedelics, which blasted us inward. Wanting to understand what we experienced with these âmind alteringâ drugs, we turned to Eastern religions to find answers.
What the East gave the West was a safe, structured way to explore the mind. Those of us who sought meditation were taught a fundamental, disciplined posture. The directions were specific: cross legs, sit at the edge of a hard round cushion, hands on knees or held just below the navel, chest open, crown of the head a little higher than the forehead, eyes cast down and unfocused. When the bell rings, do not move. Go! And where did we go? Noplace, at least externally. The instruction was to pay attention to our breath, but as soon as we tried we found instead hurricanes of thoughts and emotionsârebellion, desire, restlessness, agitation.
It was all I could do to sit still. Suddenly I wanted to sob at the memory of my grandmother and the feel of her thin skin; I recalled why my tenth-grade boyfriend had dropped me ten years earlier, and how it felt when the novocaine on my first root canal ran out while Dr. Glassman was still drilling. No wonder our schoolteachers stayed away from the meat of writing. To have us contact our raw minds in class would have incited immediate chaos: hordes of teenagers bolting from their neat rows of wooden desks and dashing for the water fountains as though the roots of their hair were on fire.
But with meditation we found a steady tool to enter this wild space and explore it. The sitting bell rang again, marking the end of the period. We uncurled our legs and looked around. The earth was still patiently beneath us, and we had had a small openingâsay, thirty minutesâto taste our minds. Zen was smart: it did not just lower us into the hot water and leave us there to boil. We were dipped in and out. We went under and then came back up to sip green tea and munch cookies. In this way we slowly cooked and digested ourselves.
There was another reason some of us were drawn to Zen meditation. It told us what to do: wear black in the zendo, bow to your cushion, donât make any noise, be on your seat five minutes before the beginning of a sitting session. After an initial rebellious tantrum where I walked out of the instruction class, I loved it. I longed for order. My guess is others in my generation craved that, too. I had had a laissez-faire upbringing. As a child I lounged around the kitchen eating boxes of Oreo cookies. My mother simply walked by, patted me on the head, and commented, âThatâs nice, dear.â I missed at least one day of school a week. âI just donât feel like going,â Iâd tell my mother, looking up from under the bedsheets. She nodded, endlessly understanding, turned around in her housecoat and left the room. âNatli doesnât learn that much there anyway,â I could hear her thinking. I sat in front of the TV all weekend in my pajamas. No rules, no requirements. On my own I decided it might be a good idea to brush my teeth and wash my face once a day.
When my friends hear this they feel envy: âWhy, itâs ideal for raising a writer.â Not true. Life was staggering. I needed organization. And the sixties didnât help. Those years only made me more confused instead of free. In Zen there were precepts: Donât lie. Donât steal. Donât create suffering through sexuality. That one I read over and over. I wasnât sure what it meant, but at least there was a scent of guidance, an intimation of direction.
So when I tried to figure out how to writeâliving in a small adobe in New Mexico, the clear Western skies out my window, the land spotted by sage, bare yellow dirt everywhere and three horses in a corralâI looked to the Eastern world for hints. I copied the structure of meditation. Sitting had a time limitâOK, writing would, too. At the beginning I wrote for rounds of ten minutes, eventually increasing them to twenty and thirty. I kept my hand consistently movingâas in meditation we couldnât moveâfor the full time. I told myself if the atom bomb dropped eight minutes after I began, Iâd go out writing. (In recent years I have softened: I concede to my writing students, âWell, if youâre writing with your best friend when the bomb drops, you might pause a moment to say good-bye. But then get going againâyou donât have much time.â)
Writing became a practice. I wrote under all circumstances, and once I started, I continued until the time was up. Especially in the early days, like Zen students who sit together, I wrote with others, not alone. I let Zen inform my writing practice because I needed writing to be rootedânot Natalieâs creative idea. I wanted writing practice to be backed by two thousand years of watching the mind. Enough of my free-wheeling childhood. I was serious.
Years later at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center where I studied with Dainin Katagiri Roshi, we chanted the lineage of teachers all the way back to Buddha. I learned that one Zen master lost his mother at nine; one was the son of a whore. My own teacher was the youngest of six children; they lived over a small noodle shop owned by his father. Nobody in the lineage began as someone special. I saw that the only way to elbow my way into the lineage of writers was by sincere effort. The fact that my father owned a bar, that my grandmother had plucked chickens in a poultry market, did not deter me. I understood that it was no more helpful to have a parent who was a well-known writer than to be the child of an army general. Actually I might be luckier with the generalâthen I wouldnât be working in my famous parentâs shadow, my path darkened by my motherâs successful novels. But no matter what, it was up to me.
I never gained control of my mindâhow do you dominate an ocean?âbut I began to form a real relationship with it. Through writing and meditation I identified monkey mind, that constant critic, commentator, editor, general slug and pain-in-the-ass, the voice that says, âI canât do this, Iâm bored, I hate myself, Iâm no good, I canât sit still, who do I think I am?â I saw that most of my life had been spent following that voice as though it were God, telling me the real meaning of lifeââNatalie, you canât write shitââwhen, in fact, it was a mechanical contraption that all human minds contain. Yes, even people with terrific, supportive parents are inhabited by this blabbing, resistant mouthpiece. But as I wrote longer, went deeper, I realized its true purpose: monkey mind is the guardian at the gate. We have to prove our mettle, our determination, stand up to its nagging, shrewish cry, before it surrenders the hidden jewels. And what are those jewels? Our own human core and heart, of course.
Iâve seen it over and over. The nearer I get to expressing my essence, the louder, more zealous that belittling voice becomes. It has been helpful to understand it not as a diminishing parent but as something universal, impersonal, a kind of spiritual test. Then I donât have to wither or sneak away from censoring dad, carping mom, or severe schoolteacher with sunken chest when I hear that onerous yell. Instead, it is my signal to persevere and plow through. Charge! I scream with pen unlanced.
But this intimacy with my mind did not come quickly and I never gained the upper hand. Instead Iâve learned to maneuver in the territory. It is something like when I first got my driverâs license at eighteen. My fatherâs big blue Buick convertible felt massive; it was like propelling Jell-O through the streets. If I smelled sulfur from a factory, or autumn leaves burning by the curb, I panicked and stomped on the brake, certain the car was on fire and about to blow up. Other than putting the key in the ignition, steering around corners, and turning on the lights and radio, I had no idea what to do with this enormous moving animal. Later, with the sprouting of feminism, I learned to change a tire, the oil, a filter. These thingsâplus I had more driving experienceâgave me a closer relationship with this entity called an automobile.
In the same way in my late twenties as I continued to fill spiral notebooks in cafĂ©s all over Taos and to sit zazen in friendsâ early-morning gardens and in my thick-walled adobe, I developed a connection with my mind. But like a juniperâs unhurried growth in the dry Southwest, the relationship matured slowly through the turning of many seasons.
Hallucinating Emeralds
IN THE LATE SPRING of 1978, as the green leaves finally broke through the heavy Midwest winter, I moved to Minneapolis to marry. I felt a new force in and around me. I walked the well-organized streets and city blocks and a desire woke: I wanted to record the writing odyssey I had been on and share with the world what I understood of practice and the mind. I was entrusting myself to marriage, why not commit my inner journey to the page? I would write a book!
I woke early and kissed my new husband good-bye. He was off to work. The morning sun splashed in the bedroom. I looked out the window: the street in front of our duplex was crowded with cars. Everyone had a job to go toâand suddenly I did, too! I rushed down to the Cedar-Riverside area of town and purchased a ream of white paper and a batch of fast-writing pens. Then I returned home and sat down behind a small wooden desk in front of a window in our living room to begin.
I wrote âwhenâ in the upper left-hand corner of my page. Naa, I said to myself, you canât start a book with that. I sighed and crossed âwhenâ out. I stared out the window. Deep maples lined the street. A short woman walked by with a dachshund on a leash. He barked and in a flash the word âwhileâ came to me. I grabbed my pen and jotted it down. I paused, nothing else came. I heaved a deep breath and struck âwhileâ out.
Câmon, Nat, I coached myself, start with the most proletarian word you can think of. I wrote âtheâ below the two other scratched-out words. Ahh, now I have something, I thought.
Then I looked out the window again. I hallucinated emeralds in the trees. I stared down the marigolds in my neighborâs yard and I cleaned my index fingernail with the cap of my pen. My eyes watered. The shadows shifted in the room. I was thirty years old, bored out of my skull. Two hours passed. A column of eight crossed-out words decorated a single page of paper. A day of writing was finished. I drifted over to the kitchen and made a shrimp-in-wine-sauce quiche for my new husband. This I liked. I had purpose; I felt alive again.
Each day I repeated the same ritual: I made it through several grueling hours of nothing happening, trying to write a book. It was as painful as the jobs Iâd had as a kid. My first one, at sixteen, was selling sunglasses in freezing gray December at Abraham & Straus on Long Island. Everyone was crowded across the aisle at the wool socks and scarves. Waiting through endless hours, I tasted my first deep boredom. And now at the beginning of my fourth decade on earth I was experiencing the same unbearable ennui. After several weeks of this I wasnât drifting, I was dashing for the kitchen.
For years Iâd bravely leaned in my sleeping bag against ponderosas in the New Mexico wilderness, propped myself at friendsâ kitchen tables, at counters in cheap restaurants and cafĂ©s, in the backseats of cars, pen in hand over my notebook, exploring the inner organic workings of my mind. Iâd given myself permission to write the worst shit in America and the freedom not to worry about grammar, punctuation or spelling. Then, suddenly faced with the task of writing a book, I balked. I denied any true understanding I had about the writing process. Instead I reached way back through the years to grab the hem of my grammar-school teacherâs skirt.
Mrs. Post was short and stout, the Napoleon of our grade school. What had she demanded of us? I frantically tried to remember. Before you start to write, make an outline: topics, subtopics, Roman numerals. Yes, yes, I could do that! and right there in my living room I made a sweeping capital I. Ah, those Romans, they would help me, I thought: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangeloâeven the pope! Then suddenly I felt crushed. That Roman number was too familiarâMrs. Postâs triumphant year slowly materialized before my eyes. There was eleven-year-old Natalie frozen at her desk unwilling to attempt any written expression whatsoever. All those rules had ruined her, and here I was so long after, trying to rely on the false security of my meanest schoolteacher in an effort to organize myself.
I even remembered young Natalieâs answer to an early fall assignment: what did you do on your summer vacation? In a scrawny small script on blue lined paper I wrote: âI had a lot of fun. It was interesting. I liked it. It was nice.â I cringed as I heard those words again in my home in Minneapolis.
If only Iâd known then that I could write the real answer to that question: last summer my mother dyed her hair red. I think she was kissing the electrician. My father wore his underwear to dinner and drank beer, and my sister and I played checkers almost every afternoon in the garage. The days were hot. The evenings were no better and mosquitoes crawled through the screens and buzzed all night in the bedroom I shared with old Aunt Doris who snored and talked in her sleep.
But instead, so long after those deathly childhood compositions, I was transported in the first year of my marriage back to those barren school wordsâânice,â âinteresting,â âfunââto try to explain the unbridled joy of writing I had experienced in the hills of Taos.
No wonder I quit. Pretty soon I had a small catering business issuing out of our modest flat. Iâd do anything not to face that âbook,â the gray asphalt staring back at me through the front window, the cars zooming into the Conoco station across the way, and to my right out the other window Mr. Steakâs blinking sign.
I quit because in truth I had no sense of how to begin a book or how to end oneâwhen do you stop? I panicked. This writing could go on forever. And the middle of the bookâthat was even worse than the beginning or the end. How could I transport what was inside me to a form outside me? I was stumped.
I did not think of the book again for six years. Then one gray afternoon in March, I was sitting with my best writing buddy Kate Green in the Croissant Express in the Uptown area of Minneapolis, bemoaning my fate. By then Iâd been writing poetry for almost thirteen years. Iâ...