On the last night of the year, meditating with others is exactly what Natalie Goldberg finds she needs. I wake up this first bitter cold day of the New Year, the streets an ice sheet, and recall my dream: small mice are marching across a flower-papered bedroom with an unmade mattress on the floor and my friend Sean sits curled up around his guitar in a wooden chair, weeping [...]
Waking Up to Happiness
Sneezing, coughing, blowing her nose—Natalie Goldberg was awfully sick yet she was happy. Happiness is available to everyone, she realized, but we can find it only when we’re still. Last summer I was sick in bed. I could write “flu” and be done with it, but that would be a generalization. My eyes were blood red and caked shut in the morning—the doctor said it was [...]
Losing Katherine
Fearlessly direct and endlessly curious, Katherine was the sort of person who might suddenly ask, “How do you know love?” Natalie Goldberg recounts what she learned from loving and losing this special friend. After two days in Paris, still jet-lagged, we rent a car to drive down to the retreat center where I will teach. The estimated travel time is two and a half hours. [...]
Waking Up to Happiness (July 2012)
Sneezing, coughing, blowing her nose — NATALIE GOLDBERG was awfully sick yet she was happy. Happiness is available to everyone, she realized, but we can find it only when we’re still. Last summer I was sick in bed. I could write “flu” and be done with it, but that would be a generalization. My eyes were blood red and caked shut in the morning—the doctor said it was [...]
Blossoms Falling
Natalie Goldberg finds herself hanging suspended between a Zen koan, an ailing hippo, and a “Who am I?” cry to greasy mechanics. I am at a meditation retreat at Vallecitos Mountain Refuge in northern New Mexico, led by a Zen teacher I have been working with from Boston. This is more than a decade ago. I’m on the board of this remote enclave deep in the national forest and, [...]
One Heart
Effort and longing, frailties and aspirations—we're in this together says Natalie Goldberg, and it is so much bigger than we are. To keep London, my friends’ five-year-old son, distracted while we waited for a table at the Bobcat Bite on Old Las Vegas Highway, I spelled out c-a-t. London looked upward to a point above my head, picturing the letters, sounding them out in [...]
Meeting the Chinese in St. Paul: Rhino Hits the Midwest
A season devoted to the koans of the ancient Chinese Masters gave Natalie Goldberg a taste for the stripped-down, naked truth of things. As she searched Minnesota for an elusive rhinoceros, a simple truth revealed itself: I’m broken and I’m free. As a Soto Zen student I had successfully steered clear of koans for almost my full twenty-five years of practice. They were [...]
A Time of No Place
Natalie Goldberg recalls a time when the bottom fell out of her life, when her place, purpose, and even her Zen practice seemed groundless. Was that a problem or the very point? I have so many good memories—swimming in the Atlantic as a young girl; sleeping under the stars by the Chama River in New Mexico; eating cherry pie with my ninety-year-old mother at Hamburger Heaven in [...]
On the Shores of Lake Biwa
“Dogen?” her Japanese friend said, “no one understands him.” “Zen training?” she is warned, “too hard for a human being.” Natalie Goldberg goes to Japan in search of real Zen, and finds it on the shores of Lake Biwa. Her days at the monastery are just about as tough as advertised, but at the end she reaches Almond Joy. I wanted to go to Japan to see the country that [...]
When the Candle is Blown Out: On The Death of Katagiri Roshi
In this adaptation from her book, "The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth", Natalie Goldberg offers a remembrance of her teacher and a cri de coeur over all that is left incomplete and unanswered by his death. Where is enlightenment when the candle is blown out? Te-shan asked the old tea-cake woman, “Who is your teacher? Where did you learn [...]
