If I didn't have that, fear and projections over what was coming next could have taken over. But it was tough. Don't think I was an angel. It was hell.
Because I've been doing my practice for so long, I knew what to do even under really hard circumstances.
So even though I couldn't bear writing about cancer, I faced it every day.
The first thing is how awful cancer was, the experience. When you first go through it, you're just trying to survive. But when I wrote about it, I really digested it. It was unbearable but I had practice behind me.
I don't know anything but writing practice, and so what I really do is direct that energy as if it were flowing down a river.
I told all kinds of stories about going to Japan, about playing ball with my father... I wanted to record my life in case it was going to end soon. So, I wrote that and it was very comforting to have that practice in the afternoons in my living room. I just wrote about my life.
While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.
That daydreaming seemed important at the time, but when I asked my teacher Katagiri Roshi about it, he said, "Oh, it's just laziness. Get to work." But as for discipline, I don't even use that word. I think more about passion or love. What I've really learned is the way the mind moves, and how the mind works. Rather than discipline, I know how to seduce my mind.
You don't know what you're doing. You're just hoping that people won't make fun of you. I had no idea how it would turn out.
