The mind is the writer's landscape, as a mountain scene might be the landscape of a visual artist. Just as a visual artist studies light, perspective, color, space, we write out of mem-ory, imagination, thought, words. This is why it is good to know and study the mind, so we may become confident in its use and come to trust ourselves.

　　Besides understanding the way thoughts shoot willy-nilly like lightning through us from wild mind, we must understand how thoughts also drift through us from monkey mind or conscious mind. They travel discursively, fearful, blind, and dumb. What is smart is our bodies, our breath, and first thoughts coming from the bottom of the mind. Monkey mind tends to pounce on first thoughts and says, "Don't think that, don't say that," and makes first thoughts into second and third thoughts. It tries to make them acceptable, so that the urge to say "Drop dead" to someone becomes translated into

　　"Why, that's a lovely dress you are wearing!" It misses or covers up the real heat and energy.

　　Writing practice teaches us to accept, connect with and write from first thoughts. But there is a gap. Monkey mind is still busy trying to get control. A tape loop is going around in our heads, saying, "I shouldn't write this," even while we are writing.

　　So we come out of writing practice having no idea what we wrote, because while our hand, connected to our arm, shoul-der, heart, and body was writing one thing, we were busy listening to the chatter of monkey mind. Monkey mind scram-bles for territory in any way she can get it, so she tells us we're bad writers, boring, stupid, incompetent. We listen and think we wrote terribly. This is why I tell students, "You don't know what you wrote until a few weeks later when you have some distance." With that distance, conscious mind isn't so fearful of wild mind. Reading your work later is a chance for wild mind and conscious mind to meet. When the uncon-scious and the conscious self meet in this way, there is wholeness. There is no grasping for territory. Before that, we are traveling down two separate paths simultaneously. When the paths meet, there is acceptance, peace, non-aggression. Imagine monkey mind as a befuddled soldier who took the wrong route and arrives after the war is over. He sits down on the battlefield, trying to make sense of the raw victories and defeats.

　　We write and then we catch up with ourselves. Katagiri Roshi once said that we don't see that we are already Buddha right here and now. We look out and see the goodness in other people, but we don't see it in ourselves. The act of turning around and catching the goodness in ourselves is to wake up. Our consciousness, that lost, scared soldier, finally meets itself. It comes smack against wild mind and is amazed. We

　　see who we really are. We become one whole person, not two people going in different directions.

　　In one writing workshop I taught in Taos, there was a man named Sun Comet. He had been a hippie in the sixties and kept his hippie name. He wrote the most astoundingly beau-tiful work in class-timed writings, but I noticed that when anyone commented on how good his work was, he was always shocked, as though someone just threw cold water in his face. Two months after the workshop, I heard that he was going to give a reading in a gallery in Taos. I was excited to hear him. I had a previous engagement, but I changed it in order to go.

　　The reading was terrible. I was so bored I almost fell asleep, as did the rest of the audience. He droned on with vague material that did not connect. It was very different from his alive writing in class. He did not think that the writing he did in class was valid. He never accepted the free writing he did in his notebooks. His conscious mind never caught up with his wild mind.

　　Over the years, he continued to take workshops and to write beautifully, alive, directly, and never knew it. My guess is that in the sixties he took too much LSD. The drug split wild mind and monkey mind so far apart that they could never speak to each other again. His conscious mind is still out there orbiting the planet. It never landed, so it never saw or vali-dated the real, connected writing he was doing.

　　This happens all the time: People fail to recognize who they really are, ourselves included. We are slow to realize the greatness inside ourselves. Maybe we never will, but if we understand this gap, we will know how to work with it in writing. "Ann, there we are, lagging behind ourselves again." Have compassion. If we understand this, we are not critical or afraid. We can be kind.

　　Well, are we ever all connected? Yes, once four yean ago in

　　a writing marathon, all of me was present with each word I put down. It felt extraordinary. Unfortunately, the marathon was with my Thursday-night writing group, fondly referred to as "the girls." They are an unruly bunch. In the middle of the marathon, they actually decided they didn't want to do it anymore and they got up and talked. I couldn't believe it. At that moment, I knew I should have stayed in the Midwest where I was living before moving to Santa Fe. In the Midwest, we would have completed the marathon. Mid-westerners would have behaved.

　　Now, don't get me wrong. 'The girls" didn't ruin my chance at enlightenment. That complete presence I felt would have snapped back after a while on its own to confusion, to engagement with the editor, but I had a sweet taste of oneness. It doesn't matter. Under all circumstances we should continue. That's why practice is so important. Just go on writing no matter what.

　　Try this:

　　Write every day for ten days in a row. Do not reread anything you have written for those ten days until two weeks later.

　　Then sit down in a comfortable chair and have a soft heart and read with interest and compassion what you have written. Underline sentences that stand out. Use those sentences as first lines for future writing practice. Put parentheses around sections you like. Develop those sections, if you want, not by reworking them but by re-entering them with more timed writing practice.

　　And be brave. Let some of the good writing go. Don't worry. There'll be lots of it over time. You can't use all of it. Be generous and allow some of it to lie fallow. What a relief! We can write well and let it go. That's just as good as writing poorly and letting it go. Just let go.