I just started re-reading a book I haven’t read in at least 20 years, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. I find it absolutely kick me in the nuts jaw droppingly amazing that despite the fact that I haven’t read this book since 1989 I remember it. I remember everything in here. This is like visiting an old friend.

The strangest thing for me, however, is that when I discovered Natalie Goldberg as a teenager with a fixation on becoming a writer, I was one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The fact that she was a Buddhist and a lesbian should have scared me off of reading her. The fact that she clearly informed her writing advice with Buddhist thinking also should have scared me off reading her. None of those things mattered to me, though. When she told me about the practice of writing, about using writing as a tool to understand myself, she transformed my life. In ways I am only now realizing as I revisit this book, I have been utilizing techniques of Buddhist practice for 20 years, consciously and intentionally. I’ve used writing exercises and techniques I learned from Natalie at work, at home, early and late, at school, in my studio, over and over and over and over. They’ve been practice for me for the last two decades. Check this out (from the book):

“From 1978 to 1984 I studied Zen formally with Dainin Katagiri Roshi … at the Minnesota Zen Center in Minneapolis. Whenever I went to see him and asked him a question about Buddhism, I had trouble understanding the answer until he said, ‘You know, like in writing when you …’ When he referred to writing I understood. About three years ago he said to me, ‘Why do you come to sit meditation? Why don’t you make writing your practice? If you go deep enough in writing it will take you everyplace.’

This book is about writing. It is also about using writing as your practice, as a way to help you penetrate your life and become sane.”

This is one of those “duh” moments for me. I am suddenly realizing the terribly obvious fact that I’ve been an accidentally practicing Buddhist in at least one respect for over two decades, even when I was supposedly a fundamentalist Christian. Hah. Nice! Sure, hindsight is 20/20 and all, but looking back over the last couple of decades and asking myself which mindset, which set of thoughts, truly informed and shaped me I gotta say that my brush up against Natalie and her Buddhism (as found in both Writing Down the Bones and also her book Wild Mind) shaped me as much, or more, in terms of my actual internal thinking and how I managed my internal life than all the Watchtowers and Awakes and meetings and conventions combined. The Watchtower Society didn’t help me understand and work with creative cycles, didn’t teach me how to use songwriting, poetry, drawing or painting to cope with depression or confusion or just to figure things out for myself, Buddhism did. The timed writing exercises I’ve used as practice hundreds, maybe thousands, of times over the last 20 years, the tricks I’ve learned through those practices to listen to and liberate my subconscious mind, the tools that have allowed me to utilize creativity to navigate my way through divorce, cancer, parenting, death, loss, and the collapse of my fundamentalist worldview were Buddhist in nature. The Jehovah’s Witnesses gave me a story, and structure, and a community, but they never gave me tools to understand myself on any level. I never thought of the tricks and techniques that I learned from Natalie’s books as Buddhist, really. Why would I? I was a Witness. If I thought of them as Buddhist, I probably would have felt bad about doing them. I just thought of them as good advice for creative people and it was more coincidence that the advice came from a Buddhist.

The funny thing is, though, that I knew. The book says so. It’s rather explicit about that. I knew that meditation practice and writing practice were the same thing. I just told myself they were different somehow, justified that there was no problem there, certainly never thought of myself as a closet Buddhist. Now though, I realize that Buddhist ideas and approaches have been helping me in my life for far longer than I have previously acknowledged. The best part about this whole thing is that now I am much more explicitly a Buddhist myself and I can reread these books with a new perspective, maybe make connections and applications of what they have to offer that I could not have done 20 years ago. From accidental Buddhist to intentional one, from fundamentalist to freethinker, I have to wonder how strong a role these books played in my eventually waking up and leaving the Watchtower? How much of my ability to retain a freethinking part of my brain was as a result of having an intentional creative practice in my life?

I don’t know, but if I ever meet Natalie Goldberg, I’m giving her a big ol’ thanks.

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