flowerhead in the snow, river valley trails, late november 2007 
more flowerheads, river valley trails, nov.07* * *
I actually made resolutions this new year; this is a rare occurrence, mostly because my natural new year's rhythm seems to fall on one level in September at the beginning of the academic year, & on another level in the springtime, in late March, when everything's melting... so it's always seemed odd to me to have a new year in the middle of winter, when my resolve for a lot of things tends to be hibernating. Nevertheless, I made resolutions, one of which is to
*read more books that have nothing to do with my thesis!
This is not to say that I don't really enjoy thesis-reading, because I do, & I read a lot of books that are only tangentially related on various linguistic anthropology things & the like. But I need to remember to branch out a little more. I have quite the list picked out, and I am excited to lose myself in something other than Language and Symbolic Power for awhile.
This afternoon I finished reading 'Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America' by Natalie Goldberg... which was part memoir, part 'Zen & the Art-of-just-sitting-down-and-writing'... I've never read any of her other books about writing (like 'Writing Down the Bones') in which she specifically discusses writing practice as a form of Zen practice (akin to zazen, or sitting meditation) but I found what she spoke of to be compelling and refreshing, as well as comforting in the strangest way. She is such an unpretentious writer, & she writes of the littlest details in a way that does not try to make them into BIG SYMBOLIC THINGS, but just presents them as they are, important and profound in and of themselves. Here she tells of a moment she experienced whilst teaching a grade six class in Taos, New Mexico.
"I stood up in the middle of 'Please, please, be quiet' and suddenly stopped. The place where my chest was sore -- it was opening, opening, red and enormous like a great peony, and it was radiating through my body. I felt the blood flowing in my hands and legs. I turned and looked out the winfow. I looked at the smoky appearance of the spring cottonwoods near the parking lot. Any day now they would break into leaf. There was a spindly Russian olive near our window. Suddenly it looked beautiful. Then I had one simple vision: I saw myself wandering in autumn fields and I felt that nothing, nothing else was important..." (Natalie Goldberg, in 'Long Quiet Highway', p.58-59)
* * *
A strange thing happened today while I was reading. I started crying about three-quarters of the way through the book, not because it was particularily sad, or intense... I can't even identify a page or a line that catalysed it... it was just strangely moving in its simplicity, so much so that before I was really cognizant what was going on, I was sitting at my kitchen table, weeping, and I couldn't stop. Not of sadness, or anything in particular. Just crying for the sake of crying, and it felt surprisingly good. I wasn't even terribly alarmed, I wasn't worried, wasn't wondering if I was going crazy, wasn't even trying to pin down my weeping on a reason. I just sat there, content in the stripes of late-afternoon sun coming through the red venetian blinds, crying until I was finished crying. & then I felt tired, & a bit strange, but oddly refreshed, like I'd just run very hard in the cold. & I am not really sure what to make of this, I know I'll read the book again & probably be able to discern what brought on this profound bout of tears, but right now it just seems a very fitting reaction, for a book about writing, & living: the importance of the unanalysed, the momentary being-not-thinking of Zen.
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