It happens like this:

You experience something and then it becomes a memory. And over time that memory crystallizes so that it is no longer fluid, but has a specific form that only time can grant it. We don’t always know what things are, how to fully categorize or process them, until they have had time to crystallize in our minds. Hindsight is twenty-twenty and all that.

“As a writer, I know I carry all the accumulated moments of my life.”

-NATALIE GOLDBERG THE TRUE SECRET OF WRITINg

Sometimes this process cracks you right open. Sometimes it brings revelations that gush like cool, crisp water over your heart, allowing you to know things that you never knew before. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, memories can simply become like hard candy in your mouth—sweet moments to suck on when you’re staring into the blue sky and something inside of it reminds you of a place you used to know.

Today that place was the California desert in February. I was outside early this morning in those few hours where the world seems to speak for itself before humanity wakes up and intervenes. It always feels somehow more real to me then. I pressed my feet to the pink sidewalks, wading through what felt like a shallow river of golden light that flowed farther and farther down the street the higher the sun rose. And it was while floating down that river that I closed my eyes and remembered standing in the middle of Joshua Tree while the sun crawled up the sky all those months ago.

“Take a slow walk down your street. Let the details of the light, trees, buildings fill you. Let the world come home to you.”

-NATALIE GOLDBERG THE TRUE SECRET OF WRITING

I would wake up, pull some jeans on, and immediately step outside onto a massive stretch of vacant desert. And I would just stand there as my jaw fell open and tears formed in the corners of my eyes because I had never felt so free in all of my life as I did there, alone, touching the world with my bare hands as the sun rose and the full moon fell. Golden light spilled like honey all over the sand, sticking to everything it touched. And it touched me. I remember standing there forever. Cold, biting February wind blowing through my hair and staining my cheeks rosy and standing there all the same, falling in love with that land and everything that its silence told me.

Like what love is, and what love is not.

Like what it means to really feel something.

Like how beautiful it is just to exist.

The world felt more real to me then than it ever had. I was brand new to the desert and it was stripped bare, dancing naked before my innocent eyes. And like the thousands of tiny butterflies that danced across my skin, I felt as light as air. I felt beautiful.

That rest of that trip was complicated for its own reasons that I discuss in further detail here, but those early mornings of solitude are the hard candies that I let linger in my mouth all this time later. They remind me that we live on a planet, not a corporation or a campus or a metropolitan playground, but a real and true, living, breathing planet.

I highlight this whimsical anecdote with a purpose: to segway into Natalie Goldberg’s brilliant book The True Secret of Writing. Goldberg is known for her manuals on writing, but they are really manuals on life itself and what it means to be a human. I picked this gem up a few years ago and have since vandalized nearly every page, marking my favorite lines. Each passage tells the story of moving through the world and learning to pay deep attention to it. If you are a writer, it is about learning how to channel the attention that you invariably already pay to the world into your writing. I have written endlessly about those days that I spent in the desert. I have dedicated whole pages to singular moments. Because while I was inside of those moments, I payed so much attention to them that it brought me to my knees. It knocked all the air out of my chest.

“…it’s exhilarating to write. And scary. It’s saying we care. We have thoughts. We exist.”

-Natalie Goldberg The True Secret of Writing

We spend a lot of our lives trying to not feel things. This I am convinced of. But I am also convinced that deep down, when you peel each memory of being hurt back like the rind of an orange, you arrive at the tender sweetness inside each of us that craves nothing more than to feel deeply. We want big, bold lives full of big, bold feelings. That’s where we get hurt. But if you pay attention, it’s also where we find love. You can’t control the events of your life. You can’t control how the world spins. But you can pay attention. You can dissect your experiences and show yourself and others that there is meaning and medicine in what we don’t talk about. I learned this from Natalie Goldberg. I am still learning it. I will be learning it all my life.

“Behind writing, behind words is no words. We need to know about that place. It gives us a larger perspective from which to handle language.”

“After a hard day of wrestling with our minds and hearts in deep silence, we all realize we are in some way wallflowers, shy, broken, closer, and truer to the human condition.”

“Hopefully, you have widened your capacity for acceptance, putting your arms around the whole lot of being human—aggression, boredom, desire in a thousand forms.”

-NATALIE GOLDBERG THE TRUE SECRET OF WRITING

JOIN THE FUN

Subscribe to give your inbox something to look forward to.