Long Quiet Highway

by Natalie Goldberg

  Sassafras, my friend from Taos, who three months earlier had moved to Boulder and changed his name back to Richard Peisinger, saw me after the lecture, and then showed up at my house that evening. “What went on with you? It seemed like something was happening to you after lecture.”

  “Oh, nothing,” I said. I wasn’t lying. I didn’t know what to say.

  A few weeks later Rinpoche lectured on the three marks of existence: suffering, impermanence, and egolessness. Egolessness! Everyone is full of ego, I thought. I remember he laughed and said, “You don’t understand it, but it is true. One mark of existence is the egolessness of existence.” The rest of the lecture was terribly boring and long and I had trouble sitting still, but when it was over, I burst out crying, as though I had just heard an amazing thing that I knew was true and did not understand.

  Then I left Boulder and returned to Taos. Our vegetable garden had grown in the six weeks I was gone. The basil leaves glinted in the sun, the buttercrunch lettuce were full heads now, and some of the radishes had already gone to seed. I loved Taos more than ever and knew that someday I would inevitably have to leave. Something was beginning to compel me. I was too young to be one of the best poets in Taos and I knew I needed a meditation teacher. I was afraid my ego would eat up all the sitting I did: I would toot my horn and think I was great or ignorant or use meditation as a measure of my value and take sitting away from just sitting. I was beginning to understand these things better. I sat my first ten-day meditation retreat in August, up at the Lama Foundation, with Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein. This was 1976. I was twenty-eight years old.

  In fall, the apricots fell ripe from the trees and we made pies and jams. The following summer I tore myself away from Taos and Neil and moved to Boulder. I became a student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

  All this while I continued to write. I tried hard to write with no aim, just to fill notebooks and to see what my mind turned up by itself without my trying to control it. This was very open space. It was the pathless path. I tried to stay directionless. Who was I really if I left my mind to its own devices? No poem, no novel, no essay; no trying to be deep or not deep, funny or not funny—or smart, intelligent, agile, beautiful, adept. Just write. “I want to learn to do nothing,” I repeated often in those years. What did I mean by that? After all, I was writing; I was meditating. I was doing something. I couldn’t articulate it then, but I wanted to be empty of my attachment to things. I wanted to allow things simply to be, without my needs and projections. I noticed that the hippies were not only poor, nonmaterialistic; it was also their creed. They made poverty a virtue and became judgmental, critical of anything not like them. The Hispanics in the neighborhood, on the other hand, had always been poor. They wanted to get out of their poverty. It was one of the things—that attachment to poverty—that caused conflict between the two cultures.

  Duality: it was a word I’d heard a lot in Buddhism. I saw it in myself: I’m a beginning writer and I want to become great; I’m over here and I want to go over there. Now I wanted to stop that. I wanted just to let writing unfold, no aim, no goal. I wanted to trust the natural goodness of my mind and life, that if I stopped worrying, manipulating, it would take me where I needed to go.

  The end of duality does not mean we never do anything. It means we are empty of a need for result. So you raise a child to raise a child, not for your own needs and self-aggrandizement, not for power or desire, but just for the life of the child. You eat a meal for the goodness of being alive and needing nourishment and you feel the bite into that apple, that bread, that strawberry, and you let yourself feel all the effort and work of many beings to bring that food to this moment: the farmers, the sunlight, earth, water, truck, grocer. When we sink into the moment of just being, we lose our illusion of separateness, our ego. I think this is what Rinpoche meant by egolessness being a mark of existence. When I wrote and got out of the way, writing did writing. There was no me; just language and thoughts unfolding, and this did not feel good or bad; there was no me experiencing it one way or another.

  In order to discover this I had to slow down tremendously. I had to be chewing the strawberry when I chewed the strawberry, instead of chewing the strawberry and not being there, because I had my mind on my math exam or the comment my friend had made at lunch or worrying about how I could buy that silk blouse and also pay my water bill. I had to pay attention to the way the taste popped on my tongue, the way my jaw moved, my urge to swallow, my swallowing, my urge for another bite. And if I sank deeply into that attention I felt simultaneously the myriad beings and life run through me. And just as I chewed the strawberry when I chewed the strawberry, I wanted to write just to write, to be there.

  I was outside American culture. I had stepped into Eastern mind. After all my years of Western education, I wanted to learn how not to think. The funny thing is you don’t learn how not to think, you slow down and let thinking be thinking, walking be walking, crying be crying, dying be dying, and writing be writing. You are present where you are. I wanted to write out of another place than A leads to B and B to C. That logic was what I was taught in school, and I knew it was rare that anyone learned how to write in school.

  When I ate that strawberry, I became one with it. Even if my attention only lasted for moments, that dissolution of myself, of my ego boundaries, felt truer than anything else I had experienced before. That same experience when I wrote, that dissolution of my ego boundaries, allowed me to join the lineage of writers. We were not separate. The simple act of moving my pen across the page linked me to all people past, present, and future who moved their pen across the page. The act of doing it connected me to a literary stream. It didn’t matter what I wrote; all writers struggled with their minds and fears and blocks. I was one of them, just as I became a Buddha with all Buddhas who sat the moment I sat, crossed my legs, connected with my breath. There was no evaluation; good Buddha, bad Buddha. There was just Buddha, an awake being, someone who was present even if just for a moment.

  When they’re writing well, writers know all these things, or experience this nondualistic awake state, but no one has been able to articulate the writing path, so it does not get passed on and each writer individually has to luck out and bump into it. But even so, each of us must make that human effort, experience the writing path ourselves and so keep it alive. Jim White, my dear poet friend, said, “Poetry will never betray or abandon you, but you may abandon it.” Poetry is always there, waiting for you to dip into it, just as the breath is always there (until it’s not there and we’re dead) waiting for us to notice it. No, not even waiting. Just there. We happen to notice it or not. We happen to connect with our own nature or not. I happened to discover writing from a whole new angle, from a fascination with the mind.

  I wanted to learn to let go of thoughts and at the same time be mindful, full of mind, not mindless. Thoughts are like water bugs darting along the surface of the water, mostly unrooted, precarious. Usually we use thoughts to try to get control of a situation, even the situation of our own mind. These are called second and third thoughts, thoughts on thoughts. We have a raw, real root thought from the bottom of our mind—“I am going to die someday”—and instead of staying with that and feeling our fear or curiosity or whatever arises naturally, we grab that thought and try to choke it. “No, not me. No, I’m not. Let’s not think about that. I’d like to buy a red car instead of a blue car.” These are second and third thoughts. In writing we want to stay with first thoughts, that raw energy that comes from the bottom of the mind. In order to do that, we must embrace the whole mind, be mind-full.

  What is mind, anyway? I think it’s hard to define because from my experience it is everything. It is open space, no boundaries, no beginning or end, no past or future. It is our chance at eternity and infinity, but it means letting go of our small selves, the self that says, “Not me, I’m not gonna die.” When we open to big mind, what I’ve called wild mind, we have to die to small mind. So, in a sense, each t
ime we sit down to write we have to be willing to die, to let go and enter something bigger than ourselves. Wild mind includes writing with our whole body, our arms, heart, legs, shoulders, and belly. This kind of writing is athletic and alive. We must get out there in the playing fields of our notebook.

  How do you enter wild mind? I don’t think it’s our job to worry about that or even to make that distinction. If we want to write, our job is to write, to surrender to our first thoughts, to write from our whole lives and to keep that hand moving, so that the whole lineage of writers rushes through us, like some great American river. Then let it be a great world river, too.

  Recently I was in Lexington, Kentucky, for a women writers’ conference. Lexington is in the heart of bluegrass country. Supposedly, it is the best place, besides Ireland, to raise thoroughbreds. In both places there are underground limestone caves that enrich the water with calcium, and that makes the horses’ bones strong. I knew nothing about thoroughbreds before I went. While I was there I heard about Secretariat, Ruffian, brood mares, studs, the Triple Crown, and the Kentucky Derby. A former student drove me out to Keenland racetrack early one morning. That’s when the horses work out, when the mist rises from that deep green grass. We drove through narrow country roads, past miles of long, white wood fences. We saw mares with their foals. I noticed how alive these animals were. Attuned to a simple movement, a car, a bird, a person, they pranced, darted across a field.

  These thoroughbreds were bred for speed and all of them went back to three original horses in seventeenth-century England. They were the most beautiful animals I had ever seen. Their whole lives they were watched, trained, regulated to make the most of the power of their lineage. Under the skilled direction of a trainer, the thoroughbreds were able to become their full potential, what they were born for: to race. I stood in the bleachers, holding a steaming cup of hot chocolate, and watched, open-mouthed. Just then a trainer let out her horse at full speed. I couldn’t believe its force, its immense moving muscular structure.

  It was April, but unusually cold. My student’s daughter was a trainer. She was twenty-nine years old. She’d fallen the year before. She was hurt badly, recovered, and was back on the horses.

  “Do you worry about her?” I asked, taking a sip from my cup.

  “There’s nothing I can do. Once you’re in this life, it’s the only life. She just lives horses,” my student told me and shrugged.

  “Does she go out, have relationships?” I asked. I was trying to understand this life.

  She smiled. “Nope. She doesn’t have time, doesn’t care. This is her life.”

  We had to leave Keenland to get back to my workshop on time. There were about eighty people in the class, most of them from the area. A lot of them didn’t care about horses, but one person told me about a man who had requested that his ashes be scattered on Ruffian’s grave. “She was an incredibly fast filly, broke her leg racing at Belmont, and had to be put away.”

  “Belmont?” I said. “In New York?” My father went to Belmont, I thought to myself. You mean these gorgeous animals were connected with betting and bookies, were connected with my childhood?

  After the workshop, another student took us out to Claibourne, the thoroughbred farm where Secretariat was buried. He was one of the great racehorses of all time. We went to his grave. He was buried in an eight-foot mahogany coffin with a gold satin lining.

  My student told me, “They don’t usually bury the whole horse, but he was special. Hundreds of people came to his funeral.”

  “Well, what do they bury if they don’t bury the whole horse?” I asked.

  “Most horses they don’t bury at all. With the real winners, they bury the head, the hooves, and the heart,” she told me nodding.

  “The heart?” I asked, astonished.

  “Yes, that’s what a horse runs with: his heart. That’s what they say, that horse has heart. If they’ve got heart, it makes up for other things, they can still win,” she explained.

  Why was I so fascinated? As I left Lexington, I came out of my thoroughbred trance. I thought to myself, my god, this is terrible. There are people starving all over the world and some of these horses auction for a million dollars. But what caught me, I think—what was at the center of this thoroughbred industry, beyond the buying and selling—was big mind, the tremendous power and radiance of these animals, their concentration and oneness when they race, and the dedication of the people close to them. I thought to myself, this is how we have to write, with that kind of heart, with that dream of racing, of using our whole body, with the depth of those green fields, with that singlemindedness, that fullness of the whole mind, the whole being.

  When I moved to Boulder I took refuge in the triple treasure: the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. I took refuge in the belief that Buddha was a human being and that we are all capable of being in that awake state. I took refuge in the dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, and in the sangha, the spiritual community of other people on the path. And what does it mean to “take refuge”? It means we can’t do it alone, we need a shelter. It does not mean we diminish ourselves—“I’m helpless.” Rather, we are connecting, coming out of isolation. We are connecting with real support, not with a career or with our boyfriend or girlfriend, but with the real support of wisdom. By committing ourselves to the teachings, we are committing ourselves to ourselves, because the practice brings out our true self.

  Rinpoche made sure to tell us that after the refuge ceremony every cell in our bodies would become Buddhist and that from then on we would be refugees, which meant there was no final home, no place we could rest; life, after all, was impermanent.

  For me, a Jew, it felt true. My people were always refugees. And as an American, too, it felt true. We were a restless lot.

  The people who had signed up to take refuge stood in line at twilight outside Rinpoche’s office. We went in singly, stood in front of his desk, told him our name, and he bent over a white piece of paper and wrote our dharma name in Tibetan calligraphy. This was our new name signifying our entrance into Buddhism. Our dharma name was supposed to be our basic energy. I guess he intuited it as we stood in front of him. I didn’t know much about this stuff. He started writing as soon as I walked in. There was a wild painting of a dragon hanging on the wall behind him. Two men in gray suits stood at attention on either side of the painting as if to guard Rinpoche. I recognized both of them as his senior students. He was wearing a navy blue suit again, and his dark Tibetan skin also looked navy blue; again I saw him as ephemeral, just for a moment. There was so much warmth emanating from him, I wanted to linger forever by his side.

  The next week was the ceremony. I bought a new dress, blue with splashes of pink flowers. We sat on zafus. There were twenty of us. Rinpoche sang a Tibetan song and threw white rice, which hit the highly waxed wooden floor and then bounced before it settled—just like rain on a sidewalk. I was married now to Buddhism and I knew I was also a Jew—I couldn’t wash that skin away—and I was also an American, a feminist, a writer. I felt no contradictions. Buddhism never asked me to deny anything I was. I knew I would always live at the edge of many worlds. I felt large enough in that moment to encompass them all. I received the refuge name “Wind Lake of Enlightenment.” It was a beautiful name. I liked it and didn’t know what it meant.

  Buddha became awakened sitting under the bodhi tree, when he glanced up and saw the first morning star in India, and twenty-five hundred years later in Boulder, Colorado, a whole bunch of us entered his path, but Buddha was Buddha. I had to make my own human effort to realize now what it meant to be a human being on earth; I had to come to my own clear vision. His existence told me it was possible. The dharma, the teachings, gave me some footholds, but now I was on my own with my own soupy, amorphous life that sometimes felt like I was engineering a bowl of Jell-O and trying to give it direction.

  A man I knew, Joshua Zim, who earlier had lived at the Lama Foundation and then moved to Boulder to be with Trungpa, t
old me once that Trungpa had stood at the top of a murderous flight of stairs at 1111 Pearl Street and called down to Zim, “Are you ready?” and when Zim hesitated for an instant, Trungpa threw himself down the stairs. Zim leaped to catch him midway, at the landing, and tore his sportscoat on the banister. Zim said what Trungpa was asking was, was he ripe, ready to be awakened. To help him, to startle him out of his usual way, Trungpa was even willing to risk his own life. Zim felt totally bewildered and dejected and said that he hoped he would get another chance someday.

  “Sure,” Trungpa said, and plunged down the remaining steps, to Zim’s complete surprise.

  Refuge was as far as I went with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche—I never caught him flying down a flight of stairs. I wasn’t very ripe, I knew that, more like the beginning bud of a peach blossom, which a long time later might become a peach, if a late spring frost or hailstorms didn’t get me first.