Teachers

Friday, April 18, 2008

"When the student is ready the teacher will appear" has always seemed, to me, to be one of those tired phrases, repeated in the absence of originality or imagination. It could be put in the same category as "God doesn't give us more than we can handle" (puh-leez!). But lately I've been thinking of the people who have appeared in my life at precisely the moment I've been ready for them. Right around the time that I started thinking about my new book, Devotion, I was seated next to Stephen Cope, author of Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, at an author event. Stephen is a scholar, a yogi, a great writer, a former psychotherapist, and a classically trained pianist. (Crazy but true.) He's also the scholar-in-residence at Kripalu, a yoga and meditation retreat in the Berkshires. I had long contemplated visiting Kripalu, but couldn't quite bring myself to go. And there he was. Stephen Cope. At a charity library event in Litchfield County. The student was ready and her teacher appeared. Coincidence? Destiny? Had it simply happened because I was ready? Or perhaps--if I hadn't been ready to meet him, I would have turned the other way and not noticed him at all?

I went to Kripalu to study with Stephen, who was teaching a workshop with Sylvia Boorstein. Even though Sylvia is famous in the world of contemporary Buddhism, I wasn't familiar with her. Again, since starting DEVOTION, I have been thinking deeply about how Judaism, my yoga practice, and a developing affinity for Buddhism can co-exist without turning into a spiritual supermarket mumbo-jumbo. As I browsed in the Kripalu bookshop waiting for the first session with Sylvia and Stephen, I came across one of Sylvia's books, That's Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist. The subtitle is: On Being a Faithful Jew and a Passionate Buddhist.

When the student is ready...

And lastly, my dear friend Abby invited me to join a small Torah study group who meets each month at her apartment in New York. Abby's friend, Rabbi Burton Visotsky, one of the great scholarly minds in modern Judaism, leads the group. After a childhood spent in yeshiva learning religious rules and laws without context, being exposed to a thoroughly relevant and open-minded discussion of the Torah is nothing short of a revelation.

I guess this student has been getting ready. It makes me wonder about all the moments in my life when I have been surrounded by teachers, and it has been me, blind, unable to understand the value of what's being offered. Because one thing this process of writing DEVOTION is teaching me is that teachers are always there, if we know where to look.

Writing Process

Sunday, April 6, 2008

I know, I know, it's been a while. I've been immersing myself in my new book, Devotion, and every last bit of energy has gone into the writing. Also, I spent most of the month of March in Italy, first teaching at Sirenland, our writers conference in Positano, and then traveling to Venice and Florence with Michael and Jacob. But now, settled back home, I seem to be reaching some kind of rhythm now, so I intend to blog more frequently, I promise.

Meanwhile, I've been thinking a lot about how the writing gets done. Yesterday I had lunch with a wonderful friend who is working on a book. He described to me the process by which he enters his writing day--a process that seemed at once perfect and beautiful and thoroughly impossible for me to imagine. Essentially, he thinks, eats, sleeps, breathes and dreams his book and nothing else. This friend of mine lives alone in the country. He doesn't have a partner or children. I found myself, listening to him, thinking of my life P.J. (pre-Jacob) and how I used to just roll out of bed and get to work in a half-asleep state, when my inner-censor hadn't yet woken up and started to assert herself. I turned off the ringers on all my phones. There was barely email or internet -- at least not the way there is now, a constant intrusion. When my friend had finished describing his writing process, he asked if mine was similar.

"It used to be," I said.
"So how is it different? What changed?"

I described a typical weekday morning. Being woken up to the Red Sox standings; jumping out of bed; packing a lunch box with an assortment of healthy and unhealthy food, a constant calculus; making breakfast; cajoling (okay, sometimes screaming at) a little boy who would rather stare into space dreamily than put on his socks and shoes. And more than all the facts of these mornings, the feelings beneath the facts. The love, fear, rage, frustration, hilarity, you-name-it, that goes into every single morning so that by the time I sit down at my desk, I have already lived an entire day, complete with a full spectrum of emotions.

So I have learned to adapt, over the years. To re-start. It sometimes worries me, how very much it requires for me to re-start, to find the place where my mind is once again uncluttered and unconfused. For the past number of years, this process has required a lot of yoga. An hour of yoga a day, by myself, on my mat in front of the fireplace in my bedroom. I have recently added to the yoga a meditation practice of anywhere between five and fifteen minutes, a practice I learned at a recent retreat with the brilliant teacher Sylvia Boorstein. So now that's an hour and fifteen minutes, say. And then, after all that is done, I need to stay in the quiet. Which means no email, no internet, no phone. So hard, to stay unplugged! Many days I fail miserably. I go straight from the yoga mat to my desk, I click on the email icon and there I find the outside world. Next thing I know, I'm reading the Times online, or I'm looking up summer camps, or Googling the man I sat next to at dinner last week, or browsing net-a-porter to see if there are any Jimmy Choo boots on sale. Need I say that this is not conducive to maintaining an uncluttered mind?

But I am aware and I am working on it. The days I manage to walk downstairs after yoga, drink a bottle of water, make myself another cappuccino, then putter back upstairs and sit in the corner chair where I write--the days I manage to get a foothold in my work before the outside world rears its head--those are the best writing days, and the ones I learn from.