This is a quick dive into one of my passions; the work of Natalie Goldberg and why I’m a fan girl.
Goldberg shot to best-seller fame in the late 1980s with her books Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind. I was completely entranced and energized by Wild Mind. My copy sports dog-eared pages and a wine-stained cover. Her honesty and language were a revelation. Was it particularly new? Maybe not, but it was new to me. I was just turning 30 and needed to re-energize my writing.
In these first books, Goldberg recommended, and proselytized, practicing Beginner’s Mind. Beginner’s Mind is an ancient Zen concept, and in her books, Goldberg carried on about it as only a new student can. I lapped it all up because I had never heard of any of this before. A perfect match. Goldberg explained how Beginner’s Mind informed her life, her relationships, and her writing. She recommended sitting Zazen, focusing on breath and thoughts for hours at a time. I had two small boys; I did not have the hours. But I loved to read her version of it. Better to read how she sat for three hours breathing, than spend that real time myself. For that alone I’m grateful to Goldberg.
And I loved her writing advice and prompts, although the recommendation to drink a glass of water slowly and consciously never took. Unlike Julia Cameron, who published the same book over and over, Goldberg allowed her advice to change with her experiences. And like Anne Lamont, Goldberg’s personal journey was an intrinsic part of her work and her teachings. I was hooked. Like everyone, the author matured, life threw her curve balls, and to her credit, she caught the ball and described what she did with it. Hold, throw it back, it was fascinating to follow her life and evolving practice. She painted, she wrote poetry, and she even wrote a novel (a rather bad novel, she cleverly kept to writing advice). I read about her complicated relationship with her father, and her book about writing through her cancer treatments.
Her latest book, Writing on Empty was about surviving COVID by having a project. Through it all, writing was its own reward and its own solution. In her recent books, she returned to Beginners Mind.
“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice
Beginners Mind is a way to an end run around your mansplaining ego and see a situation in a new light. What if you don’t already have the answer? What do you think now? Maybe the person who shot through the stop sign wasn’t discourteous but on the way to the hospital. Maybe writing a poem about war isn’t futile, maybe it will help, you can’t know, you must just do it.
Unconscious bias is a huge subject: what are we thinking that we shouldn’t be thinking? Is our thinking correct? Are we aligned with our principles with every encounter? It’s exhausting. But worth doing in our creative lives.
Beginners Mind is great if you live in a quiet ashram and can consider carefully every situation you encounter during the day. We cannot be open and sensitive about everyone’s situation, which is why our brains developed bias in the first place – fast, easy, that is a terrible person, get on with the grocery shopping.
We often get in our own way because we assume we know. We’ve been on earth for quite a while now, why wouldn’t we already know? (My husband turned left into a dead-end road because, he explained, all freeway entrances are to the right. While he reassured me, he blew right past the arrow pointing right). No blame. As experts, armed with a billion data points, we sometimes assume we know everything. We don’t.
Experience and knowledge are some of the benefits of maturity, but they can also be a trap, an endless loop. Remember your grandparent’s phrase “Because we’ve always done it this way.”? And remember how resistant our parents were to any new idea or new way to accomplish an old chore? And remember how both generations became resentful about the changing world?
Our advantage is that every time the God Damn phone updates, we must learn something new. This is certainly a bug, but it’s also an interesting feature. Our electronics and information streams force us to update our minds and our behavior on a painfully frequent basis. Learning something new takes time and energy, doing it like we’ve always done it is easy. They don’t call it the groove for nothing.
Beginner’s Mind encourages us to pay attention to the sign even if we don’t feel the sign is right.
Write your truth, and don’t get caught up in what you know, I’d even advocate don’t get caught up in your own success. Write something new today. Write something that’s not in your genre or even in your established expertise. Julia Cameron doubled down on her initial advice (write three morning pages a day, walk every day), and good for her. But I loved following Goldberg’s career. Her life changed, her devotion to writing and publishing did not. She authentically follows her early Zen training and approaches every book, every writing session, new, with Beginner’s Mind.
I love her work. Beginner’s Mind is like writing from the heart.
The Artist Way by Julia Cameron
Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg,
Zen Mind, Beginners Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
