There are so many things I want to tell you.

It's been one of those months where experiences stack on top of one another, and I've been leaning into these practices of "resting and digesting", allowing them to take precedence over the production schedule I have in my head. I've been listening to the feeling of deep silence and stillness in my body. I've had a few weeks of sharp contrasts. The first five days of December, I took myself on a retreat to an airbnb room in the Santa Cruz Mountains, just over an hour from where I live, yet importantly *not* where I live. One of Natalie Goldberg's rules for writing is to leave the house. Don't allow the laundry, the electric bill, the UPS package tracking, the dishes, the urge to buy snacks to serve as your excuses for not being with yourself on the page.

I know this list of temptresses well. I am fully convinced that the cat dishes need to be replenished, the fire in the woodburning stove must be stoked, the garden needs weeding, the floor needs sweeping, anything to keep me in motion rather than coming into the quietness in which the bubbles of my true experience begin to rise from somewhere back behind my guts to the center of my chest, behind my heart.

During my five days away, I was participating in a ZOOM writing and meditation retreat with Natalie and several hundred other students from around the world. We had all studied with her before, and with that familiarity, she took a deeper dive into the practice of stillness, silence, and sitting that are equal partners in her approach to writing. Each day, the structure was a morning sitting, followed by a three-hour session with Natalie in which she shared a combination of her favorite stories of writing practice, reading aloud from whatever was inspiring her, and putting us into her signature timed writing practice, starting with the word "Go!”. She would then invite several volunteers to read their writing aloud without feedback, and then we would gather to sit silently again in the early evening.

I have been a practitioner of Natalie's way of practicing writing for at least twelve years. When I was deep in the throes of burnout, near the end of my tenure as a violin school owner and teacher, I started to dream of writing memoir. An acquaintance, the fiery proud mother of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, suggested I check out Natalie’s work. I discovered her book, "Wild Mind", and it provided a way back to myself, through pen on the page. No one had ever told me I could or should just write, without editing, losing control, going for the jugular, letting it rip. It sounded exhilarating, terrifying, and filled with possibilities I had to explore, especially at that moment in my life.

I don't know that I imagined ever studying with Natalie in person until I saw her name pop up in an email in 2019. She was offering a two-week sit-walk-write memoir retreat on Madeline Island, an arts education center at the border of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. I signed up for both weeks scheduled for August 2020. In the interim, my mom received her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and I began to clear my calendar, even before the first lockdown began. I put away any plans I had made in 2019, and began the march down this path into a new, post-Covid world.

What I didn't expect was the way a new world would open to me as so many of us began gathering on ZOOM. In 2021, I participated in two "live" ZOOM retreats with Natalie, and I have received a deep transmission from being in the presence, even through a screen, of someone who has sat, walked, written, taught, and practiced for more than forty years.