I am on a backpacking trip in Frijoles Canyon, part of Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico. We followed a trail along a stream that cut through pink-and-orange cliffs. In the morning we saw deer—mule deer, I am almost certain that's what they were—first one and a little later two. When they saw us, they didn't run so much as hop away.

　　Now I am leaning against a boulder. The stone cools my back. Reader, even though you are not here with me, I want you to look up at the sky. Do you see it? It is a big sky. If you've never been this far west, then imagine standing be-neath the sky in Ohio: a two-lane highway, the day gray, you can see the horizon all around. Nothing disturbs that view but an occasional farmhouse with a row of Russian olives as a windbreak or a white square building on the side of the road that says EAT in thin neon. The bottom line of the £ and the left branch of the A are broken off.

　　So, either in New Mexico or Ohio, we are under a big sky.

　　That big sky is wild mind. I'm going to climb up to that sky straight over our heads and put one dot on it with a Magic Marker. See that dot? That dot is what Zen calls monkey mind or what western psychology calls part of conscious mind. We give all our attention to that one dot. So when it says we can't write, that we're no good, are failures, fools for even picking up a pen, we listen to it.

　　This is how it works: You've always wanted to be a writer, but instead you decide you should become a health care worker. You go to school for four years. You get a degree in social work. \bu are at your first day of your new job, listening to an orientation, and you realize you really did want to be a writer. You quit your job, go to the library with a notebook, and begin page one of the great American novel. You are halfway through page one when you decide it is too hard to be a writer. You want to open a cafe so writers can come in and sip the best caffelatte and write all afternoon. You open the cafe. You are serving caffelatte to all the writers in your town. It is a Tuesday. You look out at your customers and see they are writing and you are not. You want to write.

　　This goes on endlessly. This is monkey mind. This is how we drift. We listen and get tossed away. We put all our attention on that one dot. Meanwhile, wild mind surrounds us. Western psychology calls wild mind the unconscious, but I think the unconscious is a limiting term. If it is true that we are all interpenetrated and interconnected, then wild mind in-cludes mountains, rivers, Cadillacs, humidity, plains, emer-alds, poverty, old streets in London, snow, and moon. A river and a tree are not unconscious. They are part of wild mind. I do not consider even a dream unconscious. A dream is a being that travels from wild mind into the dot/monkey mind/con-scious self to wake us up.

　　So our job as writers is not to diddle around our whole lives

　　in the dot but to take one big step out of it and sink into the big sky and write from there. Let everything run through us and grab as much as we can of it with a pen and paper. Let yourself live in something that is already rightfully yours— your own wild mind.

　　I think what good psychotherapy does is help to bring you into wild mind, for you to learn to be comfortable there, rather than constantly grabbing a tidbit from wild mind and shoving it into the conscious mind, thereby trying to get control of it. This is what Zen, too, asks you to do: to sit down in the middle of your wild mind. This is all about a loss of control. This is what falling in love is, too: a loss of control.

　　Can you do this? Lose control and let wild mind take over? It is the best way to write. To live, too.