Tricycle | Awake in the World

Natalie Goldberg is a writer and writing teacher living in Taos, New Mexico. Her books include the best-selling  Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (Shambhala Publications) and its sequel, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life (Bantam). Her most recent book, Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America (Bantam), is an autobiographical work featuring reminiscences of her experiences with Dainin Katagiri Roshi (abbot of Minnesota Zen Center), her first Zen teacher. Katagiri Roshi came to the United States from Japan to help Shunryu Suzuki Roshi at San Francisco Zen Center and later went on to found his center in Minneapolis. A collection of his dharma talks, Returning to Silence, is available from Shambhala Publications.

Last fall, one year into Goldberg's two-year leave from the writing workshops she leads, Tricycle asked her about being a writer, Zen student, and writing teacher. Her responses are interspersed with italicized excerpts from Long Quiet Highway.

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I think there's nothing better than being a teacher and a student. It is an education. But Katagiri Roshi taught me what it was to go beyond the teacher, to be a great living, breathing, human being who gave a hundred percent to life—forget about the dharma—to life, to what it means to be alive and to love not just another person but to love every moment. He used to say, "Our goal is to have kind consideration for all sentient beings every moment forever." So that was very large. He gave me a big vision of not only what a teacher could be but what a human being could be.

Once I went to Roshi . . . 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," said Roshi. "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.

Dainin Katagiri Roshi (1928-1990)

Katagiri Roshi said to me, "Natalie, make writing your practice." I could have hit myself against the wall trying so hard with sitting meditation. But he saw that my energy was really in love with writing.

I think a lot about what it means to be a student. It's an important question. Writing is what I put my energy into, so I know the most about writing and am the clearest in it. When I listen to dharma teachers, they're always talking about writing.

Roshi was my great writing teacher. I studied the mind with him. One of the things I have come to understand more and more is that I wasn't just studying "mind," I was studying his mind. In studying his mind I got a vision of how the dharma can manifest—otherwise it's too abstract for me.

Natalie Goldberg

When I go deep enough with writing it takes me every place that Zen does. But with writing, in the end I have a book, a product, whereas in Zen you have nothing. Good writing is when someone gets out of the way. You have to call on larger forces—not your little mind—in the process of writing, and in some way every one is doing the dharma, we just don't give it that name. Dharma is the truth of the way things are. What happens to writers is that because they haven't linked their work to a larger spiritual practice, they step away from the notebook or the computer and go back to their social mind and say, "No, I am not spiritual." But all writers are spiritual when they are writing.

In his list of essential rules for writers, Jack Kerouac wrote: "Be submissive to everything, open, listening." I could easily have missed who Katagiri was if I hadn't put myself in a position to go back, over and over again. I understood that I was not "submissive to everything," and that I often missed something good because of my ignorance, so I would persist at something for a long while until I tasted it.

I tell writing students to read a lot of books by one author that you fall in love with. Read until you and that author become one and you take on their mind. That's how you learn to write. But I also love to be face-to-face with the teacher.

Katagiri Roshi simply gave me another vision of the world. Reading that we are all one, that we're interconnected, interdependent, that's very abstract for me. It was actually having a relationship with Katagiri that taught me.

[One] year I was given the job of Zen host, which meant I took care of all guests and visitors. I was happy to have that job. Paul [another student] became doan . . . in charge of the zendo and was there almost every day.

Whenever a guest came, Roshi inevitably asked Paul to take care of that person. . . I became exasperated. Why didn't Roshi send them to me? After all, wasn't I the host, didn't I have that position? I went and visited him in his study.

"You know, Roshi, you should send people visiting Zen Center to me. I'm the host. Don't send them to Paul."

He looked at me, his head to one side. "It's okay to do nothing," he said, and nodded.