Writing, Singing, and Zen

I did this little sketch last summer at our local farmer's market here on the Hardwick Common.  Every Sunday for four warm months, folks around here brought their maple syrup, vegetables, llamas, chickens, eggs and baked goods to our enormous common area.  During the event, local musicians sang songs, mostly from the 1960s, each week with varying proficiency.  Sometimes, people winced at the off-key Dylan renditions.  Other times, a guy would show up with a banjo and blow us all out of the water with his talent.

It doesn't particularly matter whether you are good or bad; music and singing makes you feel better.  They've done studies to prove it.  I think the same thing is true for writing, although once you start getting over-zealous, imagining fame, desire kicks the writing from a fun place and into a place of ego.  Lately I've been unearthing some of my books by Natalie Goldberg, who wrote "Writing Down the Bones" so long ago.  She's an old hippie, of course, although last time I was in Santa Fe, I discovered that she'd crept down from funky Taos to live in that more touristed city. Oh well...why not, she's getting along in years.

In the past, when I used to get more guidance from my dreams, I would have wonderful, soulful dreams about singing at the top of my lungs after a few hours of writing.  It was affirming.  Listen to Natalie's words about writing as a spiritual path:  "A writer's path includes concentration, slowing down, commitment, awareness, loneliness, faith, a breakdown of ordinary perceptions--the same qualities attributed to monks or Zen masters...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self.  Our society couldn't bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.  We are less and less interested in the products and more interested in its process...that there is nothing to hold on to in the end."

 On the heels of writing the 50,000 words for National Novel Writing Month, I have to agree with Natalie.  I loved a lot of that month-long process, even if it was annoying as hell.  For one thing, I set part of the book in Kuwait, and by doing so, I was given a chance to go back there selectively, without still living next door again to a blaring mosque with several speakers on its tower grinding the call to prayer in Arabic into my sinuses.  And since, for once, I wasn't secretly writing about myself in the novel, it was completely freeing to re-experience that gravelly desert through different eyes.  No matter what the results might have been, it felt like singing.  It made me feel alive.