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--> Extract of the book Wild Mind (http://www.1800ceoread.com/details.asp?productid=0553347756)

I am on a backpacking trip in Frijoles Canyon, part of Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico....

Reader, 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 beneath the sky in Ohio...

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 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. You 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 that attention on that one dot. Meanwhile, wild mind surrounds us...

So our jobs 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...

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. - Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life