Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home
By Natalie Goldberg. (Shambala, 194 pages, $16.95.)
"We write to taste life twice."
Anais Nin said that, but Buddhist author and noted writing teacher Natalie Goldberg has lived it.
In this short, raw memoir, Goldberg, 70, recounts her cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatments and how writing proved fundamental in helping her process her fear and embrace the reality of the unknown.
Goldberg, who was a longtime student at the Minnesota Zen Center, now lives in New Mexico, and in a Murphy's Law twist on an already tough situation, her partner was diagnosed with breast cancer at the same time.
As it should, Goldberg's lifetime of Zen training becomes a useful tool, and along with writing, her salvation as she finds her uneasy footing in this suddenly fragile world where mortality "hung out on my right shoulder like an animal, patient yet hungry."
Interspersed are flashbacks of odysseys the writer has taken over her lifetime to the graves of those she admires — her Japanese Zen teacher, John Keats, Gregory Corso, Richard Hugo, Carson McCullers — offering them a prayer of gratitude, a stone for remembrance and, after her own diagnosis, a nod of recognition.
How do I live? A person now more intimate with death asks while seeking a way forward. Coming face to face with death, we can truly come to realize how in love with our lives we are, Goldberg finds, and she offers up as wisdom, to each of us, really, the Buddha's last words on how to proceed and, yes, even bloom: "All things that are born must die. In any case, continue with vigor."
Natalie Goldberg will be at the Clouds in Water Zen Center, 445 Farrington St., St. Paul, at 7 p.m. Aug. 21. Free, but donations requested.