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Natalie Goldberg (1948-)

http://nataliegoldberg.com/

https://www.scribd.com/natalie7goldberg_1
https://thesunmagazine.org/_media/article/pdf/335_Goldberg.pdf
http://www.eliezersobel.com/wildheartjournal/natgold.pdf

The author of ten books, Natalie Goldberg is perhaps best known for her 1986 classic Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Her 1993 book Long Quiet Highway is a glowing memoir of her relationship with her revered Zen master, Katagiri Roshi, who died on March 1, 1990. In her most recent work, The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth, Goldberg revisits her memories of Katagiri Roshi in the light of the posthumous discovery that he had been sexually involved with a few of his female students. The Great Failure examines her connection with both Roshi, whom she views as her spiritual father, and her own biological father—two men whom she loved deeply, but by whom she felt disappointed and betrayed.

PDF: Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (1986)

PDF: Long Quiet Highway: Waging Up in America (1993)

PDF: Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth (2004)

PDF: Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World (1997)

PDF: Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

PDF: Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer's Craft (2000)

"Of course, we are drawn to teachers that unconsciously mirror our own psychology," writes Goldberg in a memoir about her wrestling match with her particular devil. In Writing Down the Bones, she coupled writing with the insights of Zen Buddhism, showing writers how to use a stream of consciousness approach to move through blocks and understand their true experience. Here, however, as Goldberg explores the link between her elegant Zen master, Katagiri Roshi, and the gritty, charming bartender father who sexually violated her, she inadvertently demonstrates this approach's shortcoming. Years after his death, Goldberg learned that Katagiri, the teacher who taught her so much (and the subject of Long Quiet Highway), carried on affairs with female students. Goldberg was shattered; she'd wanted to believe he was an immaculate refuge. Liberation through disillusionment is a universal and durable theme, yet as Goldberg muses and tells stories—splicing in a long Zen tale for a little extra-dimensional oomph—her account closes rather than opens up. In spite of her fluid writing and honesty, the work feels insular and self-cherishing, like personal notes rather than a compelling narrative for the rest of us. Many readers will conclude that this is a not-so-great failure after all, or perhaps a heartache that hasn't really healed.
From Publishers Weekly

PDF: The Great Spring: Writing, Zen, and this Zigzag Life (2016)

Face-to-face with Natalie Goldberg
By Tricycle Winter 1993

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 excerpts from Long Quiet Highway.

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.

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.

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 everyone 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.

I think a student actually creates the teacher. When a student is alive and eager it wakes up the teaching seeds in the teacher. In a way, it's the student's responsibility to create a teacher and also it's the student's responsibility to feel compassion for the teacher and understand that they are human beings and to ask: How can I help this person? How can I encourage them and feel great gratitude to someone who is willing to take on the position of being a teacher? I think students need to wake up and have compassion and feel great gratitude for anyone who takes on that position. From many years of being with Katagiri Roshi and really digesting his mind I began to understand how ungrateful I was.

I think if we feel gratitude, we're halfway home. It means you're open enough to receive this teaching, that we're not coming from the usual monkey mind and critical mind. You know, outwardly Katagiri Roshi was a simple person. I slept through half his lectures, probably most of them. But I loved him and stayed with him and was committed to him; but I think it was through my writing that I understood what he was talking about.

Three years after I took lay ordination, I went to Roshi. “I'm ready to take bodhisattva vows.” A bodhisattva is someone who vows to return lifetime after lifetime to help all sentient beings and who does not enter nirvana until everyone goes before her.

Roshi laughed. “You've already taken them.”

“When?” I asked.

“When you took lay ordination.” He laughed and laughed.

Katagiri Roshi used to repeat what Dogen said about getting soaked with dharma: if you walk in the mist, you get wet. So I just kept trying to walk in the mist. I think I stayed pretty dry but I trusted that maybe it was coming in not through my mind but through my toes, my palms, my elbows—like poetry and writing. It was different than the usual way you learn. I just kept hoping it was coming into me in some way.

I remember specifically writing on artistic stability. Roshi used to talk about spiritual stability. When I wrote about artistic stability I meant that a writer lets everything out and runs from nothing that comes up in their writing. This gives a writer great stability so that anything that comes up is eaten and can be used for writing rather than making believe it doesn't exist. I realize that's what Katagiri Roshi meant by spiritual security and I realize that his spiritual security was based on never being tossed away under any circumstance. You stand up in your life. When I wrote about stability in writing, I understood what he was talking about.

What I wish for in a writing student is someone who just continues to write under all circumstances and doesn't care whether they are good or not good, and if they are boring it's fine, and if they are not boring, it's fine, but that they continue with the practice. That's the best.

I remember one Saturday afternoon I was sweeping in the kitchen. It was late March, gray, a bit windy, always cold, but bearable now, winter's back had been broken. You could stand outside and your face wouldn't freeze off. The phone rang. It was Pam. She was already twenty minutes late to pick up Roshi to drive him to the airport. She called to say she'd be another ten minutes.

Oh, my god, I thought. He'll miss his plane. I frantically went looking for him.

He was standing outside by the curb next to a valise. It was not a suitcase, modern with zippers and nylon. It was a valise, square, gold colored, with latches. Roshi just stood there in his black robes as though he had no idea Pam was late. He stood, not waiting, not impatient, just standing.

I ran to him. “Roshi,” I called. “Pam will be another ten minutes.” My hands were thrown up in the air. I was probably shrieking.

He nodded, unperturbed. “Thank you,” and just continued to stand. He wasn't waiting; he wasn't coming; he wasn't going.

Katagiri Roshi died three and a half years ago. After he died I starting studying with Thich Nhat Hanh. I listen closely to what he is saying. I am studying another angle of the dharma: a man who came out of the Vietnam War, a man who is from Vietnam, who never married (Katagiri had married), who is a poet and an artist in his approach to the dharma. He teaches us to keep making the dharma interesting, to change it—not the dharma—but our practice, to keep it alive. That's what I do with writing. I'm writing a novel now because I've never written one.

Thich Nhat Hanh says that if you learn one kind of practice—like watching your breath—and you stay with it for ten thousand years, you might become bored with it or might not be awake to it, so you keep changing things.

Thich Nhat Hanh is a world leader, he's a movement, so my relationship with him isn't the way I experienced Katagiri as far as one-on-one teachings go. I have been looking for another teacher to whom I'm willing to reveal how stupid I am. It's a little harder now because when I went to Katagiri I was so ignorant and I could learn so much because I exposed myself in ways in which I am too smart to expose myself now. And I am well known as a writer now and often I call American dharma teachers and they say, “Oh yes, Natalie. I love your book.” I needed to find someone with whom I could begin at zero.

When Katagiri was dying, the president of Zen Center went to him and said, “Roshi, when you die, if you die”—he was trying to be very polite—”what is your dream for Zen Center?” And Katagiri, being a very down-to-earth person, said, “I would like to get the roof fixed and the upstairs painted.” And he said, “Natalie will raise the money.” So last November I did a big weekend benefit in Minnesota for the Zen Center. At that workshop, during lunch, I sat down at the table with a man who had flown up from Tallahassee. He'd studied with different Zen teachers. I told him I was looking for someone and he just smiled at me and said, “Go find George Bowman in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” I called the Cambridge Buddhist Association and left a message. George called back and said there'd soon be a three-day sesshin, and suggested that I come. I said, “Well, did you ever hear of me?” And he said “No.” I said, “Okay, then I'll come.” So I went and I have been working with George ever since. Of course, ( laughing ) now that I know George I want him to read all my books and get to know me, you know, get to know how famous I am. See how fast my ego comes right up?

After one lecture, I visited Katagiri in his study and said, “Now, that lecture was really boring! I had to do everything to keep awake.”

His face fell and I could see he was hurt.

I stopped. “Roshi, you look hurt. How can that be? You're enlightened, you don't have feelings.”

I didn't know for a long time that Katagiri was a human being because he was coming from a whole other worldview and he was pretty fantastic. I think now we understand that teachers are human beings and that everything they do doesn't come from an enlightened mind. We have a kind of backlash now and are very critical. I think it's wise to be more discrimnating, but I also think in some ways that naivete helped us to learn. In the seventies, we just opened up and were eager, and I think that openness and eagerness is actually what drew those teachers to America.

Recently I listened to a tape of Roshi lecturing. I was amazed how difficult it was to understand him, how hard I had to concentrate. In the years I was with him I grew used to his English and after a while it was fluent for me. Hearing the tape reminded me of how difficult it was for him. At the same time, how deeply he understood me, Jewish-American from Long Island, feminist, writer, rebel with a hippie past. How hard he worked to penetrate our culture.

Suzuki Roshi once said to the early hippies who came to him in San Francisco: “With your dress and long hair and beads, you all look alike. I can't tell the difference. Shave your heads, get in black robes, and I can see your individual uniqueness.”

Katagiri said everyone was so willing to learn in those days. We'd do anything. But now we have the attitude of, “Well, how does the dharma fit in with my life?” The dharma can't fit in with our life. The dharma is our life, and it's not about convenience. And now, having American dharma teachers with us, we see that they are like us, so we are overly critical. First of all, we are very critical of ourselves and we project that onto them, and we also are more hip to what they are doing and not doing, and so sometimes it's very hard for them to transmit the dharma because we're stuck on what color socks they are wearing. But the American teachers also make us realize we are the dharma, each one of us. When I saw Katagiri, he was fabulous but he was magic and foreign. I thought I couldn't do it.

One day Suzuki Roshi and Katagiri were in a plane flying from New York to California. [At that time, they were still working together at the San Francisco Zen Center.] Katagiri told me that in the airport in Detroit, where they had to change planes, two businessmen in suits kept staring at them in their black robes.

Finally, one of them came over.

“My friend here says you're Korean, but I think you're Japanese. Could you tell us which you are?”

Suzuki looked up and smiled. “We're Americans,” he said. Katagiri giggled.

When they were back in the plane, flying over the Iowa cornfields, Suzuki, who was sitting next to the window, motioned for Katagiri to lean over and look out. “This is where the Americans are,” Suzuki said, pointing down, and they both nodded.

Katagiri longed to be there, where the Americans were. He longed for the workers to come and practice meditation after work, leaving their lunch pails and shoes by the door, bowing, and sitting zazen. . . .He wanted to teach ordinary people, farmers, mechanics, waitresses, construction workers, how to meditate. After all, he was an immigrant. He, too, had ideas about America.

At least now there's a chance of Zen happening here on American soil. And I love Zen and I want it to be here so I want it to be American. I feel part of my job is to make Zen American. With Writing Down the Bones I digested Zen, and even though I didn't talk about Zen in the book very much I think it grounded the teaching about writing. I think that what is important for us is to make Zen an American idiom, to digest it so that it's ours.

As Katagiri said, he just needed one student. One student who wakes up, who gets it. It's up to all of us now to be that one student.

 

Beyond Betrayal

Caryl Göpfert speaks with best-selling author Natalie Goldberg about her “failed” relationship with her teacher, Katagiri Roshi
Tricycle Magazine, Spring 2005

The author of ten books, Natalie Goldberg is perhaps best known for her 1986 classic Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Her 1993 book Long Quiet Highway is a glowing memoir of her relationship with her revered Zen master, Katagiri Roshi, who died on March 1, 1990. In her most recent work, The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth, Goldberg revisits her memories of Katagiri Roshi in the light of the posthumous discovery that he had been sexually involved with a few of his female students. The Great Failure examines her connection with both Roshi, whom she views as her spiritual father, and her own biological father—two men whom she loved deeply, but by whom she felt disappointed and betrayed. Zen teacher Caryl Göpfert spoke with Goldberg last fall in Stanford, California, about The Great Failure and the lessons she continues to learn from her disillusionment.

So what possessed you to write about failure? It's something we don't talk about much in our society.

In our society we're always running from failure and running after success. I knew that failure was the underbelly, the thing we keep hidden, the thing that we're most frightened of. Usually the things that we're frightened of have a lot of juice, a lot of power. And my understanding of Zen practice is that it's about really sitting down with the underbelly, facing things like death and betrayal and disappointment that we never want to look at.

I don't necessarily make a judgment when I say failure. The Great Failure is beyond good and bad. It's about seeing through illusion to how things really are. I had a lot of deluded ideas about what it is to have a relationship with a father. Some of them were wonderful, but they didn't really match up with my experience. And I had the dream of perfection with Katagiri Roshi. I had him up on a pedestal. Six years after he died, information came out about him that didn't fit my idea of perfection, and so it broke down that illusion. And that helped me to wake up a lot.

Disappointment and failure bring us down to the ground so we can see through our ideas to the way things really are. And when that happens, it is really the Great Success.

Do you see a direct connection between your relationship with your father and your relationship with Katagiri Roshi?

Because there was pain in my relationship with my father, I unconsciously went seeking for someone I could believe was perfect, a relationship where I could feel safe enough to let my true heart out. And I did feel safe enough with Katagiri. I was lucky. I could keep my illusions for a long time. And through those illusions, I was able to connect with my true heart—connect with all the love that, with my father, I was always holding back in terrible fear. If I opened up to my father, I was afraid I'd be grabbed. So I never got to experience who I truly was with him. And with Katagiri, I did.

After Katagiri died, my heart was broken. But that heartbreak was also the entryway to waking up on a deeper level, by breaking through my misjudgments about who he was.

What was your inner landscape like when you found out that Katagiri Roshi had been sleeping with students?

I was in incredible shock. I went into complete denial for several days after I heard the news. I couldn't digest it. It was so far from my idea of who he was or my experience of him. And then, slowly, I took it in. I actually took off for three months. I canceled everything and went up to the Mesa, where I lived and just sat with it.

I cried a lot. I found myself remembering all the years I practiced with him in the zendo. It was almost like watching a movie that would run in front of my eyes automatically, without my calling it up. I watched that movie of him in the zendo, and I realized this behavior had been right in front of me all along. He flirted a lot, and he even came on to me. I just wasn't willing to see it.

I went through hating him. I went through missing him terribly, really wishing I could speak to him about it—and yet knowing that, because he came from a very reserved Japanese culture, he probably wouldn't be willing to talk about it, even if he were alive. But I really wanted one more time with him where I could say, “What the fuck did you do?”

It was agony. I had an outbreak of shingles from the stress. I just could not find equilibrium. It completely tossed me away, because he was such a strong foundation for me. I was heartbroken. But going all the way into it brought me to my own awakening, brought me to stand more solidly on the ground.

Why do you think it affected you so strongly? As some of your critics have pointed out, it wasn't your boundaries he had violated.

If you put poison in one side of a lake, it doesn't stay there. It poisons the whole lake. What a teacher does affects the whole community. We thought there was one thing going on, and something entirely different was happening. There was a secret. We didn't really know who this teacher was. There was a part of him that we didn't know about, a part that was suffering and dark and unclear. There was a shadow over our community and our practice that will affect us over and over again, until we look at it.

My understanding of Zen is that it involves a willingness to see things as they are, not as we want them to be. And that's why I wrote the book.

Some students I know just repressed the new information and said, “Well, he's a great teacher anyway.” It's definitely true: He was a great teacher. And this also happened. Let's incorporate all of it. It's much more real. One of the ways to become an adult is to learn to hold ambiguity, polarity, the gray area. He wasn't either great or bad. He was both great and bad. He had problems, and he was also wonderful. How do we hold both? And not cut off one?

The Great Failure is the large embrace of everything. How do we hold someone we love who has also betrayed us? Usually we grab for either black or white – we either love someone or hate them. If we love them, we ignore the ways they let us down and betrayed us. And if we hate them we ignore the gifts they gave us. How do we hang out in the gray area, which is much more real?

When you learned about Roshi's affairs and deceptions, did you feel that somehow you had failed too? Was that part of your pain?

I definitely felt like a fool, naive and stupid. Like, “Natalie, wake up, you live in your own little dream world.” I definitely felt foolish and now I definitely am wary, on one level. On another level, I trust more deeply because I'm more deeply connected to myself.

I studied with Trungpa Rinpoche, and I remember a line in one of his poems that I always pondered. He said, “Don't trust anyone.” I never felt like this instruction came from paranoia. And then I heard that Suzuki Roshi had said that to Yvonne Rand: “Yvonne, your problem is you trust people. I don't trust anybody.” I think what they were saying is that when you have this limited idea of trust, you put someone in a box and they have to behave a certain way. So that's a frozen idea of trust. “Not trusting anybody” means allowing them, moment to moment, to be different.

Now of course, at the same time, that doesn't mean that your teacher shouldn't be respectful of you and your vulnerability and your boundaries. On another level, trust is tremendously important. At the beginning of our practice, we come like a little puppy dog to our teacher. We're encouraged to keep trusting and to open up and surrender.

And also, in the beginning, our illusions are important. In some ways, those illusions bring us to practice. Hopefully, in the process of practicing, we wake up to how things really are. But it's not bad to have some dreams at the beginning. When I started writing, I didn't know what it was to be a writer. I didn't know what basic hard work it is. But my dream to be a writer brought me along, and then I met the task.

In betrayal and in failure, there are some real jewels. But wouldn't we much rather have a relationship in which we mature slowly? For instance, isn't it better to have a relationship with your parents in which you grow up and move away from them in a natural and beautiful way? Unfortunately, that doesn't always happen. And in spiritual communities, it doesn't always happen, either. So what do we do? We take what is in front of us and wake up from it.

I think that what I really did with this book is honor my father and Katagiri, because I was willing to go deeper than just my illusions about who they were. I was willing to go the next step because of my deep love for them. I was willing to try to see them as clearly as I could.

What Failure Can Teach Us

Buddhist writer Natalie Goldberg talks about how the darkest aspects of our lives can be the most spiritually illuminating.
https://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/buddhism/2005/02/what-failure-can-teach-us.aspx

Natalie Goldberg, a practicing Buddhist for more than 30 years, is the author of 10 books, including the best-selling "Writing Down the Bones", a guidebook for writers. Goldberg considers writing a spiritual exercise, and it has helped her come to terms with her relationships with her father and her teacher, Dainin Katagiri Roshi.

In ways her birth father never was, Katagiri became a trusted mentor, and she practiced Zen with him for 12 years. But the idealized image she had of her beloved teacher shattered when she learned, after his death, of an inappropriate relationship he'd had with another student. Goldberg's decision to write about his transgressions publicly has cost her many friends in the Zen community who want to protect their teacher's reputation. Goldberg believes she is in fact honoring Katagiri by acknowledging the whole truth of his life, both good and bad, and considers his flaws with compassion rather than judgment.

In "The Great Failure" Goldberg faces the demons of both her father and her teacher. Using her own experiences as a guide, she spoke with us about how difficult times can help us grow spiritually.

How can failure be useful to us spiritually?

Failure is what we're all running from, we're always running toward success with failure at our back. And actually, which one of us has never failed or never been disappointed or betrayed? What I learned to do was to step back and enter the heart of failure. There are a lot of jewels there for awakening.

Are there particular ways to work with failure, other than acknowledging it?

I think what I did in the case of my father and Katagiri Roshi-two people I loved very much and who also betrayed me-I really entered that betrayal. I didn't cut off the love; that's what we usually do-we either make it black or white, success or failure. "The Great Failure" is about embracing both.

And how do you do that? Well, you can practice, you can go to therapy, you can write about it, cry a lot-you know, it's kind of a practice of grief because we have an idea that we won't fail. You know so it's a process that we're human beings and on this earth and that we're going to fail, we're going to be betrayed, we're going to be disappointed, and the world is not the way we thought it was. So it's really entering a process of grief in some ways and being willing to enter that pain.

Do you think it would be harder or easier for you to come to terms with the ugly truths about your father and Roshi if they were alive now?

I think that in some ways that's beside the point. It was a path that I would have liked to be able to face them and talk to them, but the people who we love live inside us and so I had to work with that part of me . We carry it around whether we can confront the person or not. And it's best to deal with it.

It would have been nice to talk with Roshi, but I couldn't have expected anything. He came from a very reserved society and I don't think he would have talked to me about it. And I don't think my father would have either. So ultimately, I would have been left on my own anyway.

At a particularly difficult point in your life, you indicate that you retreated into meditation-but almost as a way of hiding from, rather than dealing with the pain. You write about the "cool illusion of serenity."

Yes, I was avoiding things then.

I think that's something a lot of people could relate to. Do you think that sometimes, instead of spirituality being a way to work through a problem, it can become a way of avoiding something difficult?

Yes. We can use anything as a way to avoid things. It's very tricky. And in a way it's trickier with religion because you can say you're sitting but you can be sitting but daydreaming the whole time. So it's a very tricky thing.

How do you catch yourself, become aware that you're doing this?

Well, for me, I do a lot of writing. I consider writing practice a true Zen practice because it all comes back at you. You can't fool anyone because it's on the page. You know if you're writing bullshit or not. So that's what I do. I can't prescribe things for everybody.

Talk more about writing as a religious practice.

You're meeting your own mind [when you write]. And when I say writing practice-I've developed this whole thing that I've written about in "Writing Down the Bones"-this is rooted in 2,000 years of watching the mind. So it's not just "some creative thing that Natalie does." What it is is you keep your hand going and whatever goes through, you put it down. Just like in meditation: Whatever comes up, you keep sitting with it and you don't run from it... hopefully. At least, if you're really doing the work. Writing is a taskmaster because it's on the page. You can't fool yourself.

On the one hand Roshi was a revered Zen master, but at the same time he had this less admirable side to him. What did you make of this sort of split or dual personality, once it was revealed to you?

Well, I understood that people are cut off-including me-and that we can cut ourselves off even in meditation. That, you know, we can do meditation in perfect peace but there's a whole animal roaring at our back that we're not paying attention to.

So understanding that split helps me to understand what was going on with him. He was really a wonderful teacher and a wonderful human being. And then like all of us, we have darkness and some of us play it out more than others. When you bring the darkness to the table, it doesn't rule you or hurt other people, but when we keep it secret, it's dangerous.

And I hope that somehow-because we're all interconnected-that my doing this helped him in some other universe.

Would you have any advice for young students who may be confronted by a teacher pursuing them inappropriately?

Well first of all, don't get involved. If they do pursue you in that way because that person has really poor boundaries and is dangerous.

You're going to be hurt. And not only are you going to be hurt, you're going to hurt the spiritual community. And not only that, I think I would speak up about it. It's very scary but I wouldn't just be silent about it. It's the silence that continues the suffering.

Since you have spoken up about Roshi, how have people reacted?

I'm afraid, in silence. I haven't heard hardly from anybody in the Zen community and they didn't want me to publish it. They wanted to keep their dream of Katagiri Roshi. They have this idea, "Well, he was a great teacher and don't mar his name."

But I'm saying this is to deeply honor him, is to be willing to see all of who he is, love him enough to embrace all of him and take him off the pedestal. Because it was partially putting him on the pedestal that allowed this to happen. He became isolated and probably lonely too and didn't get any feedback.

I feel that "The Great Failure" is really a book written out of great love and a willingness to face all of who a human being is.

You write that death gets harder each year and as time goes on because it sinks deeper into your consciousness.

Yes, it penetrates more deeply that this person you love is not coming back. You know, someone goes away and then they come back. We're not programmed that they never come back. It's hard for our little human brain to get it.

Natalie Goldberg on the zen of writing, Minnesota haunts, and cookie meditations
by Erica Rivera
City Pages, June 14, 2016
http://www.citypages.com/arts/natalie-goldberg-on-the-zen-of-writing-minnesota-haunts-and-cookie-meditations-8301150

Former Minnesota resident Natalie Goldberg shot to bestseller status 30 years ago with Writing Down the Bones , a book that combines writing instruction with concepts of Zen practice. Two of Goldberg's subsequent books, Long Quiet Highway and The Great Failure, delved into her studies with Minnesota Zen Center founding abbot and Soto Zen roshi Dainin Katagiri; the former was an homage following his death while the latter revealed the secret life and extramarital affairs he had with female students.

Goldberg's latest book, The Great Spring , is a wise and tender collection of awakenings throughout the author's life, many of them involving experiences in, and the landscape of, Minnesota. Aside from her legacy as an author, the New York native has been a tireless teacher and mentor to thousands of writers throughout the world as well as a longtime painter.

Goldberg now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She answered our questions via email from Germany in anticipation of two readings in Minneapolis this week.

City Pages: In The Great Spring , you have a chapter about meeting Larry McMurtry, an author you admire. You also have a chapter about filming a documentary on Bob Dylan's roots in Hibbing. What did those experiences teach you about idolization?

Natalie Golderg: That sometimes it's enjoyable, it's an experience of reaching, but ultimately it's all a projection. Sometimes, though, I think it gets you going. It got me to Hibbing and to Archer City, places I wouldn't have gone otherwise.

CP: What is your relationship now to the Minnesota Zen Center, especially considering the revelations about the community in your book The Great Failure ? Do you anticipate visiting there while in the Twin Cities for your upcoming readings?

NG: No, I won't go to the Minnesota Zen Center. I never heard from anyone after The Great Failure came out — that silence was essentially their disapproval. But the truth is when I think about it, I never received any support for Writing Down the Bones or Long Quiet Highway either. It was painful, but it's when I received my own authority as a writer — from myself.

CP: If you could speak to Katagiri now, what would you say to him?

NG: “Thank you, thank you, thank you. Even your mistakes helped me to grow.”

CP: You write that “The Midwest gives you that illusion of home, especially when you're lost and looking in the wrong places.” You've lived in many states. Where do you consider “home”? Or do you feel as if you have multiple homes?

NG: I have many homes in my heart — Minnesota, New Mexico, parts of California, Paris, Kyoto — but I also know that we are all essentially homeless. [There is] no solid ground we can cling to forever.

CP: When you lived in Minnesota, did you find that winter weather was conducive to writing because it kept you cooped up and limited distractions?

NG: Hmm, not so much. It penetrates any idea you have of cold. I have never forgotten that experience of living through Minnesota winters, and I can't seem to stop writing about them. Even in the introduction to The Great Spring , I talk about winter here.

CP: Did you, your personality, or your writing voice ever feel constricted by “Minnesota Nice” culture?

NG: Not really, though I saw it all around me and felt sorry for that constriction. Luckily, when I won the Bush Fellowship in l982, my judges were from outside the Midwest: Tess Gallagher, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Robert Haas. I always felt I could never win a contest judged by Minnesota judges. I used too many four-letter words. But at the same time, I want to tell of the gratitude I feel for the state. I learned to write there — and where else could I be employed as a poet!

Also, in a house across from Lake Calhoun, I met Katagiri Roshi, who I call my “great writing teacher” though he only taught me Zen. Through Zen I learned to write — not well-being, but the ground of being. The Loft, the classes I took there, and the writers I met also gave me tremendous direction.

CP: You've written about a chocolate chip cookie meditation you did regularly at Bread & Chocolate in St. Paul. What other restaurants or foods in the Twin Cities do you feel are worthy of such rituals?

NG: Any place can be worthy of slowing down and noticing what you eat. That was a unique time for me in St. Paul, when I was breaking out of strict Zen and realizing it everywhere. I do love your cafes, they're so spacious and sprawling with time, as long as you want to hang out. Not every place has them like you do.

CP: What is the longest period you've gone without writing? Without meditating? Did those pauses serve a purpose?

NG: Six months probably is the longest. It served me to realize I better get back to my practice, that I'm a little crazy without it, especially writing, which seems to massage and give shape to my brain. But those times of non-doing I'm sure helped, allowed me to receive the world and reality rather than create it.

CP: Are there are any particular locations in Minnesota that you are eager to paint?

NG: Yes, I love to paint old houses, dilapidated ones in Minneapolis. I walk around looking for them, and garages, and trees. Maybe I'll try a lake.