I now realize, too, that when I left Lama in the fall I stole the first zafu (meditation pillow) I ever sat on. I instinctively felt it was mine. I just took it. Immediate, direct: I didn’t do it sneakily. Meditation was mine. I took it joyfully, openly. I still own it.
One night a group of women gathered at Rosemary Ryan’s house on Morada Lane to create a women’s group. What form would it take? I stepped forward and said, “I’ll teach a women’s writing group and it’ll be sixteen dollars for a round of eight weeks.” I had no plan to propose that until I stepped forward, and I did it with such confidence that the women eagerly agreed. Before this group the only teaching of writing I had done was at the local hippie grade school. Most of the women traded with me for the class rather than paying me. I received fresh-baked bread, a hand-sewn pillow, even ten dollars worth of food stamps. I didn’t really care, but somehow an exchange seemed important.
My experience in women’s groups prior to this writing group was one of a profound resistance to leadership. Anything that smacked of hierarchy was tainted by the male system. But because I bloomed into this position as the teacher—it was natural, spontaneous—and because I suggested something everyone latently had a wish for, writing, there was no need for a struggle over authority, and everyone seemed happy to have a direction and the structured activity for the group that I provided. We all wanted to do something.
Teaching that group became a deep focus for my life. By the time I came to the meeting each week, I was brimming with ideas for writing topics. “Give me this moment,” I would call out, and we would all dive into our notebooks wildly surprised and delighted at what came out. “Okay, now ten minutes on your grandmother’s teeth.” The pens would fly. I thought of writing as egalitarian, anyone could do it: If we spoke the language, if we learned to read and write in public school, if we had an arm to hold a pen, why just, “Go! for ten minutes.” We would read our writing aloud immediately afterward. No chance for the editor to butt in. We were all eager to read aloud. There was so much support; no one felt ashamed or embarrassed of her own mind. I think I must have been electrical in those days. I believed in writing so much that everyone else believed in it, too. Though I was the only self-declared writer, everyone was happy to share writing with me. It gave my own work a focus and a direction.
The group took writing out of the realm of the lone individual aloft a mountaintop, pecking out granules of terse truth on a typewriter. We made writing communal, about relationship. We learned about each other. The aim was to glow, not to publish. And we discovered we glowed if we stayed connected to first thoughts, the first way our mind flashed on something. That was where the vital energy was and we learned together how to express it through original detail—the real details of our lives. And that’s some of what Ginsberg talked about in his Interview. Together we explored our dreams, first sexual experiences, obsessions, our mothers, our fears—nothing was off limits, because writing included everything.
Hari Dass, the Hindu guru I met at Lama, had a saying: “Teach in order to learn.” In the writing group, we had all stepped outside the usual structure, so no one thought to ask on what authority I taught. Taos was like that then. It was okay to try something new and not be fabulous at it immediately. It was very tolerant of failure, which fostered beginners who would most likely fail a lot. You could learn to play a guitar one week, pluck out a few good songs, and the next week be on stage. It made for tremendous fresh energy.
At that same time, my friend Michael Reynolds began his experiments with solar homes made out of beer cans and old tires. He was sitting in a pyramid he had built out in a nearby town—not on any drugs—and five wizards appeared to him and dictated information that he wrote down in a notebook. It took him many years to digest and understand what they said about time and space and energy. These understandings went into his buildings. He was an architect with a degree from the University of Cincinnati. His architectural training did not include advice from wizards, but having moved to Taos, his vision under that big sky expanded. He let himself receive information from ethereal sources and he created sound homes with that information, homes built of recycled materials, that use no source of energy but the sun for heat and electricity. Now, seventeen years later, his buildings are called Earthships.
The breakdown of traditional ways of perception that was alive in the hippie generation and in the life of Taos allowed people to experiment with the seemingly ridiculous—building houses out of beer cans or having a writing group where everyone wrote together right there and then read their work aloud. There was even a sound therapy group I attended for a while. We called ourselves “The Screamers.” I honor Taos for giving me and others that space.
When I returned to Taos years later, after Writing Down the Bones was published, I learned another thing about the place. Though it could accept failure, success was strange to it. Right after I signed a contract for my second book, I spoke with someone who had stayed in Taos for eighteen years. I was excited and blurted out, “I’m ready to go as far as I can, to go all the way. To get as good as I can be.”
She paused. She was honest. She said, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say anything like that before.”
But Taos, those roots of freshness, is what we must come back to over and over again, no matter how successful we get.
Once the other women surprised me and borrowed a cabin from a friend in the ski valley. They blindfolded me and brought me up there for the weekend. We wrote all the time—on rocks by a stream, among wild strawberry patches, just ripened, on the wood deck of the house, leaning against aspens—and because it was summer, we enjoyed the freedom of sun on our bodies and no one else around. At night they made me a huge steak dinner, ordered the meat special from the market in El Prado. Odd, now, to think of that steak—all of us were quite health-conscious—but I think it was symbolic, bacchanal, wild, not our usual way. We wrote and wrote.
“Throw out a topic,” I’d say.
Jean said, “Kissing.” We bent our heads over our notebooks and wrote madly for ten minutes.
“Another topic,” I’d say.
“Green tea,” Cecile yelled out. No discussion, we just jumped in and wrote again.
Then we read aloud, no editing, and we listened to each other, with no praise or blame.
Here is something I wrote during that weekend fourteen years ago that has survived:
Listen!
let’s just decide to stay
no one’ll notice—
really!
the air’s good
your butts need exercise
there’s berries to be picked
our backs bent over
like stones in sun
We make good meals
Not a lot of flies
We’ll write books together
great philosophy
poetry
I’ll buy a green convertible
we’ll go tooling in the country
I don’t like building
someone else will do it
I don’t like working
someone else will earn the money
MONEY!
We!
We don’t need money!
We have beautiful
breasts and souls
good sneakers
Roz has a fine hat
and socks we’ve got
We have everything!
(“Eight Nude Women on Sunday in the Mountains,”
in Chicken and In Love, Holy Cow! Press, Minneapolis: 1980)
That women’s group did not end after eight weeks. It went on for several years. Some people left; others joined us. No matter who came and went, I was always there. Sometimes only three people showed up for a certain evening. That was fine! I taught anyway. For me there was no such thing as failure. I loved it so much that if no one had showed up, I would have talked to the chairs, the windows, the mountains, the trees about writing practice. I was completely committed. T
his group writing woke up something dynamic in me. I was unbeatable, never discouraged. I set up a second women’s writing group to meet in the afternoons in my living room. We sat in a circle on the floor with notebooks on our laps. Then I set up a third one. I invited people over on a Saturday night—men, too—and Neil, my boyfriend, and I would lead them in word jams. One night we took off on the old jazz line, “Same old used to be,” and we went round and round, each person doing oral riffs on that phrase. “Same old same old used to be the same, now it’s different but used to used to used to be old and then the same...” All of us clapping and banging pots.
I did go to Naropa to study with Ginsberg. The summer after I read that article I signed up for six weeks of classes, a poetics course with Allen and a Buddhist lecture course taught two evenings a week by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan meditation master. Rinpoche had escaped Tibet after the Chinese invasion when he was twenty years old, leading hundreds of people across the Himalayas to India. They boiled the leather on their backpacks and ate it when the escape extended over one mountain range after another and they ran out of food. This impressed me.
Ginsberg’s class was wonderful. He told us stories about Jack Kerouac and what it was like to be a poet in the fifties. He wanted us to understand the depth of the Beat generation and how its poetry was serious, even scholarly, that it had a link to all great poetry. What he said about writing he knew from experience. He was a working writer. He knew rhyme schemes and poetic rhythms that I had never heard of. He always sat behind his desk in a nappy suit he told us, holding up the lapel, he bought at the Salvation Army. We read Hart Crane aloud, wrote ballads. I wrote a bawdy one and was delighted by it. I’d never written a ballad before. I sang it to myself as I rode a friend’s bike around the tree-lined streets of Boulder.
Ginsberg had tremendous humanity. I remember being at the bar of the Boulderado Hotel, the Naropa hangout, when Ginsberg walked in. Someone half-drunk whom Allen had never met grabbed at his sleeve and said something surly about Ginsberg’s fame. Instead of being annoyed, angry, or abrupt, Ginsberg turned to him and gently replied, “Yes, I am a poet. What would you like?”
Allen often had a lot of people over in his apartment for a meal. I remember I was there once, there were eight or ten of us at the table and he was encouraging us to eat—his lover of that time had made a big pot of soup—when there was a knock at the door. It was a Jehovah’s Witness. Allen invited him in. “Eat, eat,” he said and found him a chair and brought it over to the table. The evangelist was so stunned he did as he was told and spooned soup into his mouth. After a while, Ginsberg turned to him. “Now, what is it you came to tell me?”
Ginsberg was a deeply practicing Buddhist and his openness astounded me. Again, I was learning from the whole person, not from a lecture in front of a class.
I didn’t stay in the Naropa dorms, which consisted of an apartment complex. I stayed at a college friend’s brother’s commune. As a matter of fact, he was the brother of Carol, my friend from Mr. Crane’s classes, the woman with the crooked front tooth who ate caramel turtles. There was an extra room in the house and it was cheap.
By the end of the six weeks, I could pedal up the steep hill on Ninth Street every day without having to walk the bike. I spent a lot of time alone, sitting in a graveyard, leaning against a stone marker, writing. There was a “scene” at Naropa, would-be writers hanging out around the stars, the published writers. I didn’t like most of the writing that was being done there. In truth, I didn’t understand it. I suspected that other people didn’t understand it either, but there was some wonderful encouragement—anything went; people could write what they wanted. We were free, antiestablishment. This was in the third year of Naropa’s existence. It was a young place then and it generated a lot of generosity. For hours one afternoon, Ginsberg wrote spontaneous poems for a dollar apiece for a fund-raiser for the school. We all stood in long lines to receive a poem.
Naropa was organic, alive. There was always the threat that it could fold financially. This was good. Only something alive can die. The public schools go on year after year. They don’t die because they are not alive. I remember a reading at Naropa in a gymnasium with six hundred people cheering six poets. In the United States, where poetry is not valued, this was a marvelous experience.
I was quiet in Boulder and just watched everything closely. I was on my way to trusting the texture of my own mind. Plus I had the land of New Mexico, Taos Mountain, the Rio Grande to rely on. These grounded me, kept me honest, were always at my back, a standard for what was real.
Being in Boulder made me realize how I had fallen in love with New Mexico. I had found a place that was mine. I realized no day went by there that I didn’t stop, take a breath and look around. I’d never seen sky so big, so deeply blue. I’d watch the big white cumulus clouds sail over Taos Mountain and then wispy ones trail behind. I felt immense, limitless as the sky and in the same moment felt unimportant, little—and that smallness felt good, placed me properly in the dimension of life: I became humble. This was my home, the beginning roots of my spiritual life. I loved the modulated, often crumbling, soft adobe houses the same color as the land, and the tall, pink hollyhocks against the brown walls. I noticed everything more in New Mexico—old rotted wood, the way mud dried, doors, gates, long dusty dirt roads, the mystical quality of Taos Mountain lost in a snowstorm, the hailstorms in late afternoon in August, the distant crack you saw in the land that you knew was the Rio Grande. I had a land I identified with and was connected to. This was important. I wasn’t so easily tossed away.
Having a sense of place is a very affirming and steadying influence on a writer. If you learn to love one place, you are more aware of other places, can imbue your writing with that recognition of the importance of place. I heard someone say that place is the third character in a novel—that’s how much power it has. Faulkner and Tennessee Williams cannot be separated from the South; Steinbeck belongs forever to California; Willa Gather eats Nebraska and the states below it; Carl Sandburg lives in Chicago; Edith Wharton has New York.
Recently in a writing workshop, I asked my students to write about their angels. My angels were places I not only loved but felt deeply about. Something had passed through me in those places: Norfolk, Nebraska, the large backyard vegetable gardens, the black turned earth, no fences from yard to yard, my friend’s white house on the corner of Thirteenth Street, that street that stretches all the way from Canada to New Orleans, and the twenty-one-year-old man I fell in love with in Norfolk after I was divorced at thirty-four, how we ate popcorn in the movie theater on Sunday afternoon, only two other people in the whole place. A Midwest rain splashed the streets when we walked out. I had finally become an American.
Another angel of a place for me was New Albin, Iowa, one mile from the land the Minnesota Zen Center owned. I’d walk there early afternoons along the winding dirt road past wild tiger lilies and red barns and go to the High Chaparral, where Ellie Mae made the best fried chicken and peach pies, and Herb, her husband, served drinks. I’d sit at a booth and watch the local farmers bring in dead rattlers they killed after finding them sunning themselves on flat white rocks high on the bluffs along the nearby Mississippi. Each day Herb would ask me, “So how’s it going up at Boodie land?” and I’d sip a sweaty Coke from the bottle with a straw and say, “Fine,” and smile. The train would go through the town and I’d hear its low sound.
Boulder, Colorado, was never one of my angels, though my time there was rich. The land itself, the mountains that surrounded the town were too dark, rough, rigid with narrow canyons. In order to make a place my angel I had to feel I could dream there, find a part of myself there and then earn that place in me from then on. Not Boulder; too many malls, too antiseptic, but because it was nothing, the land stepped back and Rinpoche could step forward, bigger than Boulder, separate from it.
Rinpoche traditionally came one or two hours late for his lectures. All three or four hundred of us waite
d, sitting on zafus, in the big lecture hall. We surmised his lateness was a secret teaching. We were naive then and thought everything a foreign spiritual teacher did had a meaning. We never thought he came late because he might be arrogant, rude, or drunk. All of the above might have been true. We know now that Rinpoche was alcoholic; he died about ten years later of complications probably related to cirrhosis of the liver. But he was also a holder of the crazy wisdom lineage of Tibet, the eleventh tulku of that line, meaning the recognized reincarnation of the tenth, and he knew something I could learn from. I accepted all the pomp and circumstance around him and tried to understand what he was talking about. Mostly I didn’t understand—either it was over my head or he wasn’t clear in his communication, but teaching in the Eastern sense is different from the Western way. In the West, a teacher imparts knowledge to a student. In the East, a teacher transmits nothing more or less than his or her being. That is why we thought Rinpoche’s coming late to class was part of a teaching. Even though I never got much out of what he said, there was something big in his presence that didn’t have to do with words. So I let his words go over me the way one listens to the wind. I don’t think, what is the wind saving?, I just let it blow over me and I hear its howl. I was hearing Rinpoche’s presence. With Hari Dass, the guru I met the first week at Lama who hadn’t spoken in twenty years, his presence was so extraordinary that I simply accepted him as out of this Western world. But here was Rinpoche, speaking English with an English accent—he was educated at Oxford—wearing a navy blue suit, a tie, and a white shirt, making fun of our promptness, holding a scotch in his hand. There still was some presence beyond his words that I felt I couldn’t shake off.
At the end of my second week in Boulder, I stood and watched as people lined up after lecture to say a few individual words to Rinpoche and to be blessed by him. Suddenly I saw that he didn’t really exist; he was fluid energy in the form of a man; there was nothing solid about him. I felt I could put my hand through him, as you can through sunlight coming in the window. I looked around. No one else seemed to see anything unusual. I looked back at him and I still saw him that way. It wasn’t a moment’s flash or illusion. I stood there for twenty minutes while he greeted everyone in line, and I watched the energy flow through him the whole time. Understand, I was not given to hallucination. Other than my heart opening in front of that sixth-grade class, nothing out of the ordinary had happened to me. Even my dreams were ordinary. My friends told me fantastical dreams about their bodies dissolving into the body of a blue heron. My dreams were on the order of: I go into a grocery store to buy a hot dog and a chocolate bar and I come out eating precisely those two things. And here I was viewing Rinpoche as ephemeral and I was certain it was true. I was standing with my two feet on the gymnasium floor. I wasn’t drunk or high. I never said anything to anyone. It felt private, real, and it impressed upon me something beyond what we think human beings to be. I left the building, got on my bike, and pedaled home under the ten thousand stars.
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