Hearing the Call, Changing the Practice

and the book that leapt into my hands

Oct 04, 2024

Once when I went travelling, my suitcase would have been laden with books, but these days, wanting to walk more lightly on the Earth, all I take is my e-reader. My bibliophile husband meantime travels with an e-reader, a few books, a half empty suitcase, and a list of secondhand bookshops for our itinerary.

While I have excellent rational arguments for keeping our reading digital, nothing dims Jon’s passion for hunting down books of his many favourite authors, along with whatever else tickles his fancy amongst the stacks he methodically works his way through in every used bookshop he can find. After a few parting shots, I leave him to it and go for a walk. Until that dangerous moment when I go to retrieve him, and stumble across some gem of a book crying out “you cannot leave me here”.

The unexpected treasure I brought home from our most recent travels was Natalie Goldberg’s The Great Spring: Writing, Zen, and This Zigzag Life. I was surprised to see it on the bottom shelf of sale books, both because I hadn’t known she was still writing books and if so, why would they be on sale? Like so many budding writers in the 80s, I devoured Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and then Wild Mind , working my way through their exercises a number of times, before placing them on my bookshelf of keepers. Now, decades later, The Great Spring has leapt into my hands.

I ration myself a chapter at a time, savouring its delights over my morning cup of tea. Mind stopping sentences tumble out of its pages, gleaming in their honesty, humour, and compassion. I mark them with a pencil, write quotes in my notebook, hold them close as I go about my day.

The first quote from its pages that I carry with me is not from Goldberg but from one of her Zen teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh. She recounts how when she was on a retreat with the revered meditation master at Plum Village, the person sitting next to her asked him how he kept his practice alive:

He smiled a wry, sweet smile. “So you want to know my secret?”
She nodded eagerly.
“I do whatever works and change it when it no longer works.”

This snippet of a larger story found me on a morning I was feeling very blah about getting back into my pre-travels meditation routine. My routine had begun some months back when the weather had turned cold. The flowers and bees had gone, and it was raining more days than not. I no longer wanted to leap out of bed early in the morning to sit in the garden on my deck. Instead, I would set up cushions on top of my bed, wrap myself in a shawl and meditate, feeling cocooned as I settled into my body while my ears followed the bird songs beyond my windows. But now this routine wasn’t working. Warmer weather was here, sap was rising and I was restless. What I was calling lack of discipline and commitment, Thich Nhat Hanh reframed as a call to change.

Once I gave myself the permission to make this change, my new practice arrived easily. As I wrote about in my last post, my park is alive with blossoms and birds at this time of year. For a long time, I have practiced my tai chi out there when the mood takes me, generally a few times a week. But now, this is what I want to get out of bed for each morning, regardless of my mood or the weather (well largely – I did hunker down inside one wet morning last week).

A few weeks in, I am still experimenting with what makes my practice work. I start with a standing meditation, paying my respects to the Country and elders of the Wangal Peoples, the traditional custodians of where I live, giving thanks to Earth, Air, Sun and Water, saying hello to the trees around me and the birds that are flitting over me. I focus on the contact of my feet with the earth, seeing if I can let my consciousness sink into the ground. Some days I go deep, other days I barely land on the surface.

Every day is different: how I feel, how I move, what thoughts distract me. Then there are the dogs that trot past or stop to gaze in puzzlement at my strange way of moving, while their owners try to entice them back to chasing sticks. Each moment carries something.

woman in black sleeveless dress standing under green tree during daytime — Photo by Monica Leonardi on Unsplash

I find many practice-enlivening stories in The Great Spring. Like the one about when Goldberg swapped her formal sitting meditation in the Zendo to her local café. At first, she mindfully ate one chocolate chip cookie over half an hour or more:

I felt the butter of it on my fingers, the chips still warm and melted. In the past, seven good bites would have finished it off. But eating was practice now, the café a living zendo. Small bites. Several chews. Be honest – was this mindfulness or a lingering? This cookie would not last. Crisp and soft, brown and buttery. How I clung. The nearer it got to disappearing, the more appreciative I was.

Over time she dispenses with the cookie and just sits, sometimes two hours, sometimes three, listening, watching, feeling the life of café, occasionally sipping her water with a slice of lemon. Paying attention.

I will never be such a dedicated meditator but reading about Goldberg’s practices heightens my senses and slows my pace as I walk down the park’s uneven sandstone steps onto the grass beneath the rustling gums and casuarinas. I realise how sloppy and fast my tai chi routine has become. I vow to do it at half speed, each day focusing on one sensual thing. One morning it is the breeze on my neck, another on the shades of green that surround me. Sometimes the focus finds me before I find it. One day a tiny lime green insect, which I can barely see without my glasses on, inches its way up my right forearm as I move from Grasping Bird’s Tail to Repulse Monkey. Then somehow it fetches up on my left upper arm during Cloud Hands. This tiny being is all over my moves.

When I finish my practice, I don’t want to take my new friend inside but she is not keen to leave me. She hangs from my arm on a thread, although she is not a spider, as far as I can see. We have a chat about her reluctance to let go, then I kneel by a garden bed and negotiate our parting slowly and gently. Since then, I have been noticing how often other little creatures arrive on my body, walking and resting on my terrain.

I know if I stay with my practice, it will evolve. When I first started doing tai chi in our park nearly 20 years ago, I would only come down with Jon, feeling too self-conscious to cope with the curious stares on my own. But in recent years, I have come to enjoy my solo times here, feeling like I am just another part of the park’s life. One of the things I love are the unexpected interruptions, the child who runs up to me yelling “what’s she doing ?”, the dog who wants to play ball, the magpie who pokes close to my feet looking for worms.

Earlier this year after not having come down here for a few weeks, I was stopped in the street by a woman I didn’t recognise. “What’s happened?” she asks. “I have missed you doing tai chi”. That’s when I realised that my tai chi practice feeds the life of the park, just as the park and its inhabitants nourish me. I am not much of an enlightenment seeker in my practices. Mostly my hope is to be more present and open, less stressed and judgemental. Generally, this works. But as I spend more time practicing in the park, it’s the experience of being in relationship that calls and enlivens me.

So my practice is working for now and, if or when, it no longer does I trust some thing else will call me, perhaps a book, a breeze, a bird or a biscuit, that will beckon me into another form of connection, another avenue of conversation, another place for presence.

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I would love to hear about your practices of connection at present. What is working for you? What feeds you and what are you feeding? What brings you into this moment?

Leaving you with this gem of a poem from Brigid Lowry, another fabulous author and Zen practitioner.