Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones fell into my lap some decades ago. It grabbed me. And Natalie has had a gentle but firm hold on me ever since. I think I’ve read everything she’s written.
I lived in New Mexico for the bulk of my adult life, at the same time she was living there. But I never met her or studied with her – then. Fast forward to just a few years ago. I was living in Madison, Wisconsin (Monona, actually). By the grace of the gods-who-support-writing-students, I saw a notice for a reading she was giving at THE bookstore, A Room of One’s Own. I went. And I had the grand fortune to squeezing into her weekend writing workshop even though it was full to the brim.
I happened to be on forearm crutches at the time – not the first time I needed them for one of my many fall down, go boom injuries. The workshop was held at The Lussier Family Heritage Center, a nature center building at the south edge of town surrounded by 328 acres of prairies, meadows and wetlands.
That same weekend my son was performing in one of the musical theatre performances at Monona Grove High School, or maybe it was in one of the (very, nearly insanely, competitive) show choir competitions.
To attend his performance, I had to leave the workshop before the afternoon on the second full day ended.
I think the show was Aida. I left Natalie for Aida. For a cast of mostly white Wisconsin high school musical theater performers to stage the story of a Nubian princess. Granted, an insanely talented passel of triple threats under the brilliant direction of married team Lori and Taras Nahirniak. Not just any group of blonde and red-headed teenage performers can pull off Elton John and Tim Rice’s Tony and Grammy award-winning musical. Monona Grove High School did. In spades.
“The fall of Nubia
Ephemeral and fleeting
The spirit always burning
Though the flesh is torn apart”
I left Natalie to sit and soak in the pounding, soulful story and to marvel at my brilliant, beautiful, multi-talented son on stage.
During the break in Natalie’s afternoon session, I shyly handed her a card and then crutched my way out to the parking lot where my husband was waiting to whisk me away to the show.
She. Followed. Me. Out.
I guess she had opened and quickly read the little “poem” message that I had penned the night before. It was the first and only time she and I spoke directly and up close. It meant the world to me. I had been working on my writing for years, studying independently at that point, and wanting to Write write , but knew that I was still a novice. I’m not being humble. I know Good Writing. I wasn’t there yet. But, apparently I was getting there. Natalie was warm and direct and said something that deeply encouraged me as a writer. If you can fall in love (platonically) with a person in the flesh who you already love in print, I fell even deeper.
At her bookstore reading, and more freely during the workshop, Natalie swore. Oh, my aching heart. I had been living in what our family called Nordic Nice Wisconsin for only a few years, after the Wild West of Albuquerque, and I nearly had had to cut my swearing tongue out of my mouth. DAMN was it good to be among another Wild non-editing Woman. I craved her directness, her practice of speaking Her Truth fully. Her-being-Her gave me permission (again) for Me-to-be-Me. I opened my mouth and began allowing all the swear words that had been compressed and swirling madly around inside me to find their way out.
And I stopped censoring myself, editing myself. I peeled off that hand that had been covering my mouth.
(Is this where I tell the story of my mom and her poised hand hovering over my mouth, at the ready, my whole childhood? Do I tell on my mom even though she’s still alive and it might hurt her feelings? Ah, the dilemma of memoirists. Truth be told, and that’s what I endeavor to always tell, she probably wouldn’t mind. She’s the one who tells that story and feeds me that narrative over and over and over again. Yes, now that her short-term memory is gone and she lives stuck in a record groove of saying the same thing until she is bumped off into another groove. But she started broken-recording me with that story long before her memory went. It’s just one of those super-duper fun family stories that becomes fossilized. How anxious/worried/on edge/stressed/strained she always was at what I might say or do….)
(I wonder how Natalie’s family has responded to her strength and truth-telling over the years?)
Natalie was sick during her stay in Madison. A cold or something. I can’t recall the details. But she encouraged us all to not refrain from talking about illness and health issues. I think I later learned that she had cancer at some point. I don’t know the timeline, if she was in those weeds at that time. But several women in the very large workshop group had medically/health challenges. I was on the damn forearm crutches. (If you have large breasts and try to use the standard crutches made for men, good luck. I can’t.)
Something about Natalie urging us to give voice to our bodily frailties unleashed a strength in me: another current that had been dammed.
Being immersed in a Natalie Goldberg writing workshop for a couple of days, had unearthed, unleashed, freed up images floating around within me. Writing Down the Bones and another of her bestseller and life-changing writing books, Wild Mind, invite, lure, goad, urge writers to do this. I am damn grateful that I was able to attend and receive her teaching.
At the time of the writing of the little poem (that was only meant to be the replacement for a stock Hallmark message) I caught a glimmer of the rising up and freedom that comes with transformation. I already had planted several butterfly habitat gardens so there’s that oft-used image of the chrysalis. But that wasn’t what was consciously in my mind. And then there’s Cocoon, the movie. The scene where they peel off their human skins to free their glorious light beings. When I first saw that scene something profoundly resonated in me. A seismic knowing. A Yes!, Yes!, Yes! Our skins, our bodies, are just a suit. And oh, the joy of taking the shell off someday and shimmering, pulsing, and no longer being gravity-bound. But I wasn’t consciously thinking of Cocoon either when I penned the few lines of words of gratitude for Natalie.
I can’t find the origin of what I have come to consider my favorite and signature quote. My sometimes suspect mind tells me that it is from Eleanor Roosevelt so I’m sticking with that:
“A great many, very important things have been done by people who didn’t feel at all well while doing them.”
I use this as my gently sharp response to people who say to me – since way back in the early days of my health challenges (over two decades ago) – that they hope I get better soon, along with other well-meaning, but unhelpful, things to say to someone who has chronic medical sufferings.
Shedding not only the body’s skin tugs at me, but shedding the notion of health as condition for living a meaningful life is the deeper and present truth I am living.
dragonfly on blazing star
you joke
that you are
fading fast
and you are
we are all
fading
but oh!
the translucence
the iridescence
that we fade into
and we take flight
shimmering
flitting
light
finally
light
~ Liz Gardner, April 2012, for Natalie Goldberg, Madison, Wisconsin
Christina Evans (smugmug.com) CL Evans photo, used by permission