every_monday tender square “every monday last winter my dear friend kate and i wrote together. we met at nine in the morning and wrote until about two or three in the afternoon. sometimes she showed up with an idea: ‘let’s write about divisions. okay? go for an hour.’ because there were only the two of us, when the writing sessions were over, we read aloud to each other the whole of what we wrote. it was a lot, with hands moving the whole time. “we tried out writing in different cafes, once even driving an hour south to owatonna, minnesota, so i could show her the bank designed by louis sullivan that i was in love with. we wrote in the coffee shop across the street. i was unemployed then, looking for a job. she was on a writing grant. “i tell you this because it’s important. we were willing to commit ourselves to a whole day of writing each week because writing, sharing, and friendship are important. and it happened on a monday, the beginning of the work week. remember this. remember kate and me on mondays when nothing in your life seems worthwhile but earning a living and you find yourself worried about it. “when i was in jerusalem for three months i had an israeli landlady in her fifties. her tv was broken and she called the repairman. it took him four visits to fix the screen. ‘but you knew even before he came the first time what was wrong. he could have brought the correct tube and fixed it immediately.’ she looked at me in astonishment. ‘yes, but then we couldn’t have had a relationship, sat and drunk tea and discussed the progress of the repairs.’ of course, the goal is not to fix a machine but to have relationships. “that is good to remember. what is important is not just what you do—‘i am writing a book’—but how you do it, how you approach it, and what you come to value. “a friend living upstairs from me once said, ‘natalie, you have relationships with everything, not just with people. you have a relationship with the stairs, your porch, the car, the cornfields, and the clouds.’ we are part of everything. when we understand this, we see that we are not writing, but everything is writing through us. kate and i wrote through each other and through mondays and through the streets and the coffee. like bleeding color into one another. “there are many realities. we should remember this when we get too caught up in being concerned about the way the rest of the world lives and how we think they live. there is just our lives and how we want to write and how we want to touch the rain, the table, the music, paper cups and pine trees.” —“writing down the bones” by natalie goldberg, p. 126–127 211009 what's it to you? who go blather from