Dear Natalie

“I don’t write at night,” I told my friend as we left the Natalie Goldberg book signing a while back. But I was buzzed, high, tripping on having met Natalie Goldberg, the famous writing teacher and author of Writing Down the Bones, Wild Mind, Thunder and Lightening, The Great Failure,  and more.

“What Would Natalie Say?”

Yeah, I can hear her in my head now, just like I do with all the teachers I adore. I once totally gave up some jealousy I had been hanging onto for 5 years, just because I asked, “What Would Steven Say?” I’m sure the Anti-Guru hates that, and Natalie proably will, too. But they can just deal. Steven does and Natalie lives in New Mexico.

I know I am a teacher’s pet, a suck up and a total fan when it comes to teachers I love.

If Natalie Goldberg can stand in front of a room and tell us how she found herself at the end of a book tour, in a hotel, barely able to remember her name or where she was after all that traveling, petting a book, then I can ask “What Would Natalie Say?” God knows I’ve petted a lot of books myself. (Lately, World Without End by Ken Follet. Go to the bookstore and pet the pages of the hardcover copy and you’ll see why.)

I try not to be obsequious, but I fall totally in love with my teachers. Some would say it’s because words are my favorite love language. Unless you are talking to me, I do not know you love me.

Natalie said so many priceless things tonight. The shortest and pithiest was , “Go!”

That was always preceded by brief, outlandish instructions on a topic for writing practice. If you want to know what I mean, read Old Friend From Far Away. Go!

“I don’t write at night.”

“What Would Natalie Say?”

She’d say, “Talk about how you never write at night. 10 minutes. Go!”

Taskmistress.

That’s okay. That’s why we love her. I could not think of anything to ask that she had not already answered in her books. I don’t know if that’s good or bad and what’s the difference anyways? In fact, she cut most questioners off with “I know what you’re going to say” and proceeded to answer their question . . . correctly. Or to tell us where she answers that and in which book.

Jesus, if I’d been writing for 20-odd years, about writing . . . well, I don’t know, but she has earned that right. She can interrupt me anytime. But I kept my mouth shut. I wanted to ask about memoirs with incest in them besides hers in The Great Failure, but I can find those on my own.

She said, “I lost the whole Zen community over that one.” She went on to say it was painful and that she came through it as her own authority.

Somewhere in there she mentioned the phrase “loving what is,” and “inquiry,”  and made me wonder if she’s a student of The Work of Byron Katie. I don’t know. She talked about how through writing and through reading difficult books, we grow up. She talked about how a book can kill us.

Do you know that it was Natalie, and the writing practice she designed and popularized that got me writing these blogs? Go!

That and Tama Kieves, who offers supportive writing practice at her Freewriting Fridays in Denver, Colorado. Only with her, it’s “20 minutes. Go!”

God, you’d think they had the same mother. Oh, wait. They do. In a sense. They’re both of Jewish heritage.  Hmm.

I picture their potty training, their mothers looking at them on the toilet, “5 minutes. Go!” 

Here, from page 238 of Old Friend From Far Away:

“Tell me what is your anchor, what you trust and can come home to over and over in your writing? Go. 10 minutes.”

It’s 10:15 at night.

I’m writing.

I’m nervous about my upcoming move, but not that nervous.

What would Natalie say?

“Go!”

Love, Ann

Quotes from Natalie’s Book Signing Talk:

“I don’t use the word spiritual. I practice.”

“When people are in denial, they stay in denial. They’re not going to come out and read your book.”

“Build a spine.”

“You have to be willing to be disturbed to be a writer.”

“Cut through that. It doeesn’t have to do with other people’s needs. It has to do with how you live your life.”

Growing Up in a Small World of My Own

“It’s time for you to grow up,” my friend said to me on the phone the other day. I laughed out loud. She just has no idea what I’ve been through. We have such different values. She has a degree in Home Economics. She was a late-bloomer. She didn’t have sex till she was 22 and married in her mid 30’s. She worked for an illusory value called “financial security,” which I think would be nice, but is hardly in my top 3 goals.
 
 
I grew up in a particular environment, with certain influences and my reactions and choices were both a product of the small world in which I sprouted.
 
 
1. Me Generation – It’s true. We really are a selfish generation.
 
 
We had that luxury and I don’t think that is a bad thing. I think it is a Good Thing ™.  I did not feel obligated to stay married when I was unhappy. I could take care of me and move on. I did not feel obligated nor impelled to have children. For over a decade, I told friends that I was too busy raising myself to consider having children. The first time I was in a place to consider wanting children, I was 36, and when I added 18 years to that, I decided I did not want to be consumed with child-raising for 2 decades, into my mid-50’s. No, thank you.
 

2. 50 is the new 30 – I think it is.
 
 
Most people guess my age in the mid-30’s. Why is that? I think it has a lot to do with Eros, our life urges. We, Children of the Sixties, Baby Boomers, if you like, have experienced such sexual freedom and choice, that we have, as Tom Robbins explained years ago in  Jitterbug Perfume, “kept the fires stoked.” Our bodies, being sexually active, still feel young, still maintain the possibilty of procreation, and our minds and hearts are still creative, possibly freer than some of the preceding generations of Americans.   
 
What we tend to forget is that partly due to this freedom, many of us put aside life goals of either marriage or career to follow our creativity in other ways, keeping our freedom to embrace alternative lifestyles and occupations. No children – no childraising bills. No spouse – no one else to factor into our decisions. No 9 to 5 job – no 40 hour-a-week schedule to keep, falling into bed exhausted every day and only running errands on our weekends.
 
 
You see? We knew what we were doing. We had the freedom to make those choices. Many of us did not make the same choices for freedom, and those who did take 9 to 5 jobs and did marry and did have children, seem to sometimes take a perverse pleasure in telling those of us who have remained in the socio-economic position of our youth that we “need to grow up.” Maybe. Maybe not.
 
 
3.  So-called “Childhood Trauma” – Why the quotes? Why so-called?
 
Because, as Byron Katie says, “Reality is kinder than your thinking – but only always.” What does that mean? It will take a book to fully explain and explore all the variations on this idea. Several could be written. My own is in the works. Let me put it this way: shit happens. And covered in the seeming shit of my childhood and my reactions to it, I have grown like you would not believe. I am a deeper, kinder, more loving, more compassionate person because of it. But this is not about the ends justifying the means.
 
I enjoyed the incestuous fellatio with my father. We had a different kind of relationship than society says we should have. My thinking started down a totally different path when one of my lovers in the early 80’s told me, “Incest is not nearly as much of a problem as the secrecy about it is.” His father orchestrated orgies for the whole family. My lover and I agreed that we both came out of it loving sex, and far more experienced, equipped and curious than other children. And for that we gave thanks. No, I am not condoning non-consensual sex with minors. Not at all. But it was my reality and it was far, far kinder than you think.
 

That friend emailed me last week with a link to www.goddesstemple.com. He wrote, “How weird has my life been than I know half of these sisters personally?” He went on to ask why I wasn’t on that page. I replied that about a decade ago I copied the ivy background from it for my own web site. And I couldn’t help but add, “How weird has  my life been that you’d expect to find me there?”
 
 
I wouldn’t change a thing. I have loved every minute of my life, including the minutes that I thought I didn’t love. I loved not-loving them. Sometimes we enjoy the ride.
 
 
I have dedicated this year to finding my Hogwarts. Make of that what you will. I may or may not find a university home, but I’m really trying to find the fit that has elluded me for these past 30 years.
 
 
At 17, I might not have known what to do with it if I found it.