a few more quotes from Goldberg
On meeting more of yourself, which entails doing anything for more than the short time of the first love-affair with the new. Natalie describes her returning students:
"The love affair with writing was over. They were taking it more seriously. All their resistances had come up. That afternoon I explained to them: 'Last year, when you came it was all new. Writing practice was a joy. You discovered you could write, you recovered old memories. This year, you want writing more, you have expectations, you suffer. It's okay, just keep doing it. You're meeting more of yourself.'" (p. 147)
A lovely metaphor for how we are interconnected, interdependent:
"Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other's presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that other person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, 'Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place.' This is how we survive long after we are dead. This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on." (p. 74)
Our teachers are not impervious. I've made mistakes like this (and I've suffered slights like this too, from students who project their own emotional characteristics onto me, just because we share some common intellectual characteristics):
"After one lecture, I visited him [Katagiri Roshi] in his study and said, 'Now that lecture was really boring! I had to do everything to keep awake.'
His face fell and I could see he was hurt.
I stopped. 'Roshi, you look hurt. How can that be? You're enlightened, you don't have feelings.'
But of course he had feelings. He was a human being. I saw that then. I had an erroneous conception of what an enlightened person was like." (p. 129)
"The love affair with writing was over. They were taking it more seriously. All their resistances had come up. That afternoon I explained to them: 'Last year, when you came it was all new. Writing practice was a joy. You discovered you could write, you recovered old memories. This year, you want writing more, you have expectations, you suffer. It's okay, just keep doing it. You're meeting more of yourself.'" (p. 147)
A lovely metaphor for how we are interconnected, interdependent:
"Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other's presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that other person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, 'Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place.' This is how we survive long after we are dead. This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on." (p. 74)
Our teachers are not impervious. I've made mistakes like this (and I've suffered slights like this too, from students who project their own emotional characteristics onto me, just because we share some common intellectual characteristics):
"After one lecture, I visited him [Katagiri Roshi] in his study and said, 'Now that lecture was really boring! I had to do everything to keep awake.'
His face fell and I could see he was hurt.
I stopped. 'Roshi, you look hurt. How can that be? You're enlightened, you don't have feelings.'
But of course he had feelings. He was a human being. I saw that then. I had an erroneous conception of what an enlightened person was like." (p. 129)
