I’m reading Natalie Goldberg again. This time I’m reading her for my Andrea Reads America project. I know she lived and taught in Taos, and I wanted her voice when I read New Mexico.
I’ve been restless lately, needing to create, yet not creating. Knowing writing would make me feel better, yet not writing.
Goldberg’s book I’m reading is the account of her cancer, Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home. In all of her books, she writes about Zen practice, about waking up, about being alive. But it is when she faces death that it becomes real, what it means to be alive.
Zen training harped on death. We won’t last forever. Wake up. Don’t waste your life.
— Natalie Goldberg, Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home
Wake up. Don’t waste your life. I marked that quote today, then kept reading. The more I read, the more restless I became: consuming, not creating; living someone else’s experience, not my own. I felt disquiet rising in me.
The things we avoid have energy.
— Natalie Goldberg, Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home
Goldberg writes of her chemo treatments, the eight hours she’s hooked up to the poisonous drip, and the friends who sit and keep her company. At one treatment, a friend and she are ready to burst from their skins from the drudgery. They get out pens and paper and say, “Ten haiku. Go!”
I had a niggling memory of sitting on a wooden deck in autumn. I was grounded, connected, and alive as I observed leaves and wrote haiku.
I turned another page and continued to avoid writing. I sat at the kitchen table, sipped coffee, and continued to read. I turned a page, sipped coffee, turned a page. And then I came to a line that made me close the book.
I recalled the Buddha’s last words: All things that are born must die. In any case continue with vigor.
— Natalie Goldberg, Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home
I rummaged in my piles of abandoned notebooks until I found the one for free writing, clicked my pen, and became alive as I observed the world, observed my reaction to the world, and processed it through haiku.
To be as content
as a cat
asleep in a sunbeam.
A cold wind
lifts hair from my neck.
Grass plumes dance.
Live with vigor —
move outside the walls
into the sun.
I wrote several haiku, and I feel better; my restlessness is gone for now. I needed that, to create. To wake up to the world.
Butterfly Mind 
That was quite a read! Here’s to the power of books.
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