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Natalie Goldberg Card #5
I’m working through the Natalie Goldberg deck of writing subjects. Each card in this world-renowned author and zen teacher’s Deck contains a writing topic on one side and a short lesson on the reverse, delivered in Natalie’s honest, heartfelt urgency. “This is my wish for you:” she says. “[T]hat you take these cards, grab the topic on one side and write, write, write . . . Remember no good or bad. Just words on the page.”
As I rummaged through my life for four memories of silence, it dawned on me that there are so many kinds of silence. Millions of permutations of this mystery we call silence. I chose four of them. People silence. Land silence. Book silence. Death silence.
People Silence
I experienced one of my most shameful, heartbreaking silences in the eighth grade. This is a poem I wrote about it:
Girls Bathroom
In 1968, I didn’t have enough up top
for even a training bra. But the Boy
trusted me to slip his folded note onto
the Girl’s cafeteria tray, and she trusted me
to carry her cryptic answer back for him to ponder.
He did. Then scribbled something under her writing.
