On Writing a Book

On Friday, I spent most of the morning reading through my blog entries for July. I have this notion that I should write another book. I am quite suspect of my multiple motives for wanting to publish another book, but pushing ahead anyway. I wonder how much of the book dream is about self-promotion and how much is the genuine desire to offer what I have learned (and am learning) in service of others?

I remember being confronted by this same dilemma when Melissa and I were beginning to gather a larger community of Zen students around us and to do more teaching in different contexts. I told my teacher that I was concerned that this larger public visibility was, in some part, driven by ego. He laughed and said, Of course it is. He pointed out that the demands of ego are present whether we step forward or step back. If I had decided that I was not willing to be more visible and not willing to take on the myriad projections of being a public teacher (my own as well as those of the people around me), that decision would be made in the context of ego desires as well.

I must admit to longing to be pure and blameless. I should hold back and not engage. I should live somewhere in the secluded forest and be free from the desire to be known. But this fantasy is equally riddled with subtle self-promotion—wanting to be (and be seen) as beyond the vicissitudes and complexities of being human. The poet and semi-recluse David Budbill has a wonderful poem he entitled ‘Dilemma’ that sets out the problem:

I want to be
famous
so I can be
humble
about being
famous.
What good is my
humility
when I am
stuck
in this
obscurity?

Me too. I have the ego dream of being humbly famous. Or is it famously humble? It was a great disappointment to me in my early twenties when I realized that if I was really humble (which always seemed like an important virtue to me) that I couldn’t really know that I was humble. The dream of being appreciated for not needing to be appreciated.

I take great comfort in my teacher’s words that there is no escape. Since ego fantasies and desires are always going to be involved, follow what calls to your deepest heart. Proceed with care and don’t imagine you will ever be free from the desires and blindness of your little self. Don’t worry too much the ego, it is always there—a necessary, if occasionally devious, companion.

Being free (mostly) from the fantasy of purity, I can live my life and create things of beauty and purpose as best I can. I can follow what intrigues and delights me. The key word here is following. But as I follow this impulse to write another book, I am often confused and occasionally quite discouraged. I have a sense that these short essays I have been writing since the pandemic began in mid-March are the book. Or the book is hidden somewhere in here, but I haven’t yet found it.

I feel like a film-maker who has shot hours and hours of footage and now has to find the movie that is buried inside it all. What is the central thread of my book? How do I select which entries to include? And what is the organizing principle of their sequence? My first book was ordered through the seasons and the year of moving into the Temple. What could it be now? Should I just pick the ‘best’ ones and put them together like a book of poetry? Maybe there is no underlying narrative, just a collection of little glimpses of life?

I have committed to myself to go back and read over everything and see what I can discern. The challenge is to hold the spirit of improvisation and trust as I do this next level of work. On Friday morning, I read over the 28 or so essays from July. I liked them a lot. Each one was a self-contained piece with a beginning, middle and end. All seemed equally about the larger life of the self in the context of the particular. But I found no grounds of inclusion or exclusion—no narrative story.

I only worked for two or three hours, but I concentrated so hard that my head hurt and I got a stomach ache in the afternoon. Being the mindful person that I am, I am beginning to suspect that my physical distress may be an indicator that I need to approach this task from a new perspective. Maybe bearing down and trying really hard is not the best approach to this part of the writing process.

This week, I’ll read over August and see if I can find a softer (and more fun) way of following. I suppose that is the commitment that is the most important—to work in a way that honors the spirit of what I am trying to practice. A published book may or may not be the outcome of my efforts, but at least I can live in the spirit of uncovering and following, which is, as I remember now, what brings me alive and what the book must be about.