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The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Writing Down the
Bones
by Natalie
Goldberg
http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Down-Bones-Freeing-Writer/dp/0877733759
Photo: Natalie Goldberg
In this issue I'm
including some of the nondual quotations from this book. The
great value of this book is that it teaches the discipline of
writing: how to practice, how to be a writer, how to
work mentally and physically, how to generate writings. Here
are some quotes:
Stay with the original
mind and write from it.
The problem is, we think
we exist. We think our words are permanent and solid and stamp us
forever. That's not true.
Don't identify too
strongly with your work. Stay fluid behind those black and white
words. They are not you.
There is no separation
between writing, life, and mind. If you think big enough to let
people eat cars, you will be able to see the transparency of all
forms so that all separations disappear.
All boundaries disappear,
as though we were looking through rain or squinting our eyes at
city lights.
Writing does writing. You
disappear.
It is not a writer's task
to say, "It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a
cafe when you can eat macrobiotic at home." Our task is to
say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist --
the real truth of who we are.
A writer must say yes to
life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp's Half &
Half, the ketchup on the counter.
It is a terrible burden
to have to be master. We are not ruling the world. It is an
illusion, and the illusion of our syntax structure perpetuates
it. ... by breaking open syntax, you often get closer to the
truth of what you need to say.
Maple Leaf
by Betty Freeman
That I dream the lady
does to be young
and to be in her pretty
red Christmas ball.
Her dress looks beautiful
like a swan.
The swan floats with his
thin white feathers
when his soft snow head
floats under to be like
snow again.
Then I like to be a woman
like the one,
to be with a long wing.
(Written at Norhaven, a
residence for women who are mentally retarded.)
Go so deep into something
that you understand its interpenetration with all things. Then
automatically the detail is imbued with the cosmic; they're
interchangeable.
The following is a long
quotation:
We always worry that we
are copying someone else, that we don't have our own style. Don't
worry. Writing is a communal act. Contrary to popular belief, a
writer is not Prometheus alone on a hill full of fire. We are
very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We
are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us.
We live in the present with all the history, ideas, and soda pop
of this time. It all gets mixed up in our writing.
Writers are great lovers.
They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to
write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read
it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses,
and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself,
stepping into someone else's skin. Your ability to love another's
writing means those capabilities are awakened in you. It will
only make you bigger; it won't make you a copy cat. The parts of
another's writing that are natural to you will become you, and
you will use some of those moves when you write. But not
artificially. Great lovers realize that they are what they are in
love with. That is what happened to Allen Ginsberg when he wanted
to write so that Jack Kerouac could understand him:
"...being in love with Jack Kerouac, he discovered he was
Jack Kerouac: that's something love knows." You are Ernest
Hemingway on a safari when you read Green Hills of
So writing is not just
writing. It is also having a relationship with other writers. And
don't be jealous, especially secretly. That's the worst kind. If
someone writes something great, it's just more clarity in the
world for all of us. Don't make writers "other,"
different from you: "They are good and I am bad." Don't
create that dichotomy. It makes it hard to become good if you
create that duality. The opposite, of course, is also true: if
you say, "I am great and they aren't," then you become
too proud, unable to grow as a writer or hear criticism of your
work. Just: "They are good and I am good." That
statement gives a lot of space. "That have been at it
longer, and I can walk their path for a while and learn from
them."
It's much better to be a
tribal writer, writing for all people and reflecting many voices
through us, than to be a cloistered being trying to find on
peanut of truth in our own individual mind. Become big and write
with the whole world in your arms.
Even if we go off
alone to write in the wilderness, we have to commune with
ourselves and everything around us: the desk, the trees, the
birds, the water, the typewriter. We are not separate from
everything else. It's only our egos that make us think we are. We
build on what came before us, even if our writing is a reaction
to it or we try to negate the past. We still write with the
knowledge of what's at our backs.
It's also good to know
some local people who are writing and whom you can get together
with for mutual support. It is very hard to continue just on your
own. I tell my students in a group to get to know each other, to
share their work with other people. Don't let it just pile up in
notebooks. Let it out. Kill the idea of the lone, suffering
artist. We suffer anyway as human beings. Don't make it any
harder on yourself.
Writing Down the
Bones
by Natalie
Goldberg
http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Down-Bones-Freeing-Writer/dp/0877733759