The Great Failure : My Unexpected Path to Truth
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y~<L Jj2^&t, ^ f X/C« -<^—-K GOLDBERG Bestselling author of Writing Down the Bones INSIGHT: The Spirit Behind the Words THE GREAT FAILURE Also by Natalie Goldberg Chicken and in Love Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within Wild Mind: Living the Writers Life Long Quiet Highway: Waging Up in America Banana Rose: A Novel Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer's Craft Top ofMy Lungs: Poems and Paintings Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World The Essential Writer's Notebook THE GREAT FAILURE My Unexpected Path to Truth NATALIE GOLDBERG HarperSanFrancisco A Division ofHarpcrCoUinsPublishers In certain cases, names, descriptions, and places have been changed to pro- tect individuals' privacy. Dogen poem from The Sea and the Honeycomb: A Boo\ of Tiny Poems, ed. by Robert Bly © 1971 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of Robert Bly. Excerpt from "Case 13: Te-shan: Bowls in Hand" The Gateless Barrier translated by Robert Aitken. Copyright © 1991 by Diamond Sangha. Reprinted by permission of North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. A small portion of this book was published in Shambhala Sun, July 2002. the great failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth. Copyright © 2004 by Natalie Goldberg. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quota- tions embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please write: Special Markets Depart- ment, HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. HarperCollins Web site: http://www.harpercollins.com HarperCollins®, jjjj ®, and HarperSanFrancisco™ are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers. FIRST HARPERCOLLINS PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED IN 2OO5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN- 13: 978-0-06-081612-4 ISBN-10: 0-06-081612-0 05 06 07 08 09 RRD(H) 10 987654321 For Michele I Acknowledgments Thank you to Erik Storlie, Tamara Kaiser, Rob Wilder, Eddie Lewis, Wendy Johnson, Judith Ragir, Jisho Warner, Jean Leyshon, and Liz Visick. Also to Dunn Brothers in Minneapolis, Bread and Chocolate in St. Paul, Minnesota, the Four Arts Society Library in Palm Beach, Florida, the Menlo Park Public Library, and the Prolific Oven Bakery in Palo Alto, California, where I wrote much of this. The following books were very helpful: Zens Chinese Heritage by Andrew Ferguson (Wisdom Publications, 2000), Boo\ of Serenity, translated by Thomas Cleary (Shambhala, 1988), and The Blue Cliff Record, translated by Thomas Cleary and J. C. Cleary. Geri Thoma, my agent, Gideon Weil, my editor— appreciate you. THE GREAT FAILURE Introduction She knows there's no success li^efailure, And thatfailures no success at all. — Bob Dylan After my Zen teacher died, a fellow practitioner said to me, "Natalie, your writing succeeded. You didn't follow the teachings. Everything Roshi taught us was about how to fail." We both laughed. But I think it was true that we were trained in defeat. Downfall brings us to the ground, facing the nitty-gritty, things as they are with no glitter. Success cannot last for- ever. Everyone's time runs out. This is not a popular notion, but it is true. Achievement solidifies us. Believing we are invinci- ble, we want more and more. It makes us hungry. But we can be caught in the opposite too. Human beings manage to also drown in the pool of despair, seeped in 2 THE GREAT FAILURE the mud of depression. We spend our life on a roller coaster with rusty tracks, stuck to highs and lows, riding from one, trying to grab the other. To heal ourselves from this painful cycle—the severe split we create and then the quasi equilibrium we try to maintain—we have to crash. Only then can we drop through to a more authentic self. Zen transmits its legacy from this deeper place. It is a different kind of failure: the Great Failure, a boundless surrender. Nothing to hold on to and nothing to lose. Sitting still, feeling our breath, we watch the electric ani- mals of desire and aggression arise and pass away. Our arms spread wide, we welcome it all. In the Great Failure we find the Great Success. They are no longer different from one another. Both dissolve into the moment. Illusions break open and we can be real with ourselves and the people around us. When obstructions are swept away, we can see clearly. Here we are, with our lives in our hands. Who were we? Who are we? I write about my two fathers, my natural one and my spiritual one. Each was a powerful man. I loved them both. I tell incidents that happened, matters not often talked about. I am looking down the raw throat of their lives. In doing this I am also facing my own. How I was deceived, disregarded, offended, how I was naive, igno- rant, foolish-—the things no one wants to behold. Why am I doing this? Because it is a way to libera- tion, bringing us into intimate connection with human Natalie Goldberg 3 life. And what is the best approach? Of course, the hard- est and most obvious: through the people we are close to. Not through some flashy movie star on the screen, but in contact with our wrinkles, our scars, with the sad way a father missed his chance in love, as though he thought time would last forever. The Great Failure is a boundless embrace, leaving nothing out. We hear the words "repression," "denial," "rationalization," any method to squirm away. But in the end this kind of coping only leads to more pain. Entire wars have been based on our inability to see. I wanted to learn the truth, to become whole. If I could touch the dark nature in someone else, I could know it in myself. I wrote this book in the hope of meet- ing what's real. It is my humble effort to illuminate the path of honesty. PARTI Don't worry ifyou write the truth. It doesn't hurt people, it helps them. — Dainin Katagiri Roshi WITH ORANGE LEAVES STILL CLINGING tO branches in that unusually mild stretch of late fall, on a sweet street in quiet St. Paul, I was about to slip my key into the front door of the apartment building. I was returning from Zen Center, where I came to study for two months. It was Monday at nine in the evening; no one was on the street. Suddenly I jerked my head to the right. One step below me in the entryway stood a beau- tiful man, shining face, almost clear eyes, in his late teens, aiming the barrel of a shotgun right at my neck. Feeling the small opening circle on my skin, I jerked my head. "How dare you!" I was about to be outraged when he hissed, "Don't make a move. Give me your purse." On my left shoulder dangled a small black backpack with three hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills. Just that day I had been to the bank. To my chest I clutched my spiral notebook, the hefty 463-page Boo\ of Serenity containing one hundred Zen dialogues, and a thinner black paperback, Transmission ofLight. On my right shoulder was a big blue plastic bag adver- tising a pharmaceutical company in white letters. My friend, a dermatologist, had picked it up for me at a med- ical convention. This bag held my old brown sneakers, 8 THE GREAT FAILURE black pants I bought when I returned a gift sweater that was too small, a Bob Dylan T-shirt a student had given me fifteen years ago, and a pair of good socks. I had gone to the gym only three times in the last month. That after- noon was my third time. "C'mon, give it up." I looked at him. He was nervous. Was this his first? Or was he on drugs? In a magnanimous moment I handed over my exercise bag. "This is your purse?" He took a step back and sur- veyed me. "Yes," I said emphatically. "You sure?" I nodded my head up and down in earnest. We were having a fashion disagreement. He turned and ran. I bolted through the front door. I had fooled him. He could keep those worn gym shoes. I felt a small victory. Five days later I was standing on the podium during a conference at a Marriott Hotel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Seven hundred people were staring up at me. The title of my talk was "Riding Your Wild Horses." I was supposed to be speaking about creative writing, but the night before I had decided to change the whole lec- ture. In St. Paul I'd been studying Zen koans, short inter- changes between teachers and students from eighth- and ninth-century China that cut through conditioned ways of seeing, enabling a person to experience one's true Natalie Goldberg 9 nature. I wanted to talk about that in my keynote speech, then to link it up to my being robbed, another kind of wake-up experience. I was sure it would work. I loved giving talks. Eventually, I'd meander over and tie it up with writing to fulfill the obligation of my original con- tract. This felt adventuresome and I was pleased. I made three notes on the smallest torn-off corner of a piece of paper and went to bed.