radical possibility
work in process//17.
Hi! I’m back from a fun first leg of the Brief Flashings book tour. If I met you, thank you for coming out in support of this wild little wonder. If you missed this round, I’ll be in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, and Boca Grande, Florida, this coming week before returning to Santa Fe for a sold-out wild writing workshop at the Santa Fe International Literary Festival on May 20.
California was a dream. I hung out with my sisters and friends, hiked Mount Tam and Point Reyes, read from Brief Flashings, sold lots of books at the Bay Area’s finest indie bookstores—Book Passage, Copperfield’s, and Point Reyes Books—and ate oysters and cake. The sun was out, the air was fresh, and California felt the way it always does to me: bright and wild, like anything is possible.
Anything is possible, but too often we forget this. We internalize others’ opinions and projections. We believe our own negative biases and don’t challenge assumptions. There are so many! Book tour is exhausting and lonely. People over age 50 should stop running. Getting older sucks. All women hate their bodies. To name just a few.
Possibility is at the heart of Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World: letting go others’ stories and writing our own instead. When I was badly injured on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in 2016 and my surgeon told me that I should never run again, I believed him for a while. I had to fully inhabit my despair and uncertainty in the wake of his grim, and hasty, prognosis. Only after I clawed my way out from the shock did I realize there was as good a chance that he was wrong as he was right. Both scenarios were plausible, so why not put my energy behind the more hopeful one?
This isn’t blind optimism or extreme positivity, but radical possibility.
Zen teaches us nothing ever stays the same, and that allowing for the unknown is a form of wisdom. The belief that we are part of the natural, dynamic energy of life is called Big Mind, and it means being open to all scenarios rather than attached to one.
The other day my friend Amy and I went walking on Mt Tamalpais. She took me up a rocky doubletrack from her house in Mill Valley to the Hoo Koo E Koo single track. I wanted to visit the little stone Buddha I’d seen beside the trail when I was there on book tour for Running Home, in 2019.
But when we got to the curve in the trail that I recognized as Buddha’s bend, she told me that the Buddha had moved on, and there was a new one now. This was her exact wording, moved on, as though the stone statue was a sentient being following a path he’d set out on a long time ago.
Amy told me that that the new Buddha was much smaller, tucked into a small notch in a bumpy rock band, about 15 feet above the trail. She pointed up. “Follow the slope down from that green bush,” she said. “Do you see it? Down and to the right of that horizontal reddish panel?” I squinted and looked again, as she continued to give elaborate viewing instructions. I did not see it.
For a moment I thought I was going to have to fake it, and pretend I saw the Buddha, though I knew that was totally the opposite of Zen, but then I could just make out the shadowy, rust-red outline of a diminutive Buddha, nearly completely camouflaged by the rock. We climbed gently up a steep incline over loose rocks and long grass to the base of the rock. The statue had not been a mirage. It was petite and serene, less than three inches tall, and slighter than most of the Buddha figures I’ve seen. To be honest, it was a little anticlimactic after the excitement of the search.
I was glad to see the little Buddha, but not seeing him would have been OK, too. Knowing he was there was enough. I thought about Peter Matthiessen’s famous book The Snow Leopard, in which he treks for weeks through the Himalayas with the biologist George Schaller, searching for the elusive snow leopard. As he draws closer to a sighting, following the animal’s fresh tracks, he realizes that seeing the leopard isn’t the point. Looking is. Looking outside of us, beyond us, we are also looking in.
Here’s another possibility: we might run or walk right by a little Buddha every day without seeing him, until one day—as Amy did—we look up, and there he is, peering down on us from his high perch, a brief flashing in the phenomenal world.
Radical possibility isn’t a fake-it-til-you-make-it strategy. You don’t have to pretend to smile through the hard stuff or put a pollyanna-ish spin on everything. The worst case really might come true, but so too might an outcome beyond imagination.
Keep looking. Practice being a possibilitist, rather than a positivist or a pessimist. Practice holding myriad different options at once and feel your grip on the outcome you desire loosen and expand. This is Big Mind.
When we live from this place, anything is possible. And everything, too.
My May 20 writing workshop with Natalie Goldberg is full, but I still have a few spaces left at Mountain Flow Camp Sept 5-8 at High Camp Hut in Colorado. Come look for the flashings with us at 11,000 feet in the San Juans. Writing, yoga, running, hiking, meditation, friendship, forest-bathing, solar hot-tubbing, sky-watching, chill time + so much more!
You are flooding my inbox and social media feeds with so many good words about Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World. Here are a few from the last few days!
“This book is so, so good. I adored it! Truly I didn’t want it to end! It’s about Zen but it’s a page-turner. I am recommending it to everyone!” --RY, Oregon "Holy, wow, this is incredible! I especially loved your preparation, beginner's mind, and being in flow. It felt in ntegrity, pure, and authentic....This book feels like a new door helping me come full circle in a fresh and free way. You absoultely hit a home run. The flashings are the way!" —PG, California "The language is electric, like lightning went through my body and energized me so much I couldn't sleep. It's absolutely fantastic." —NG, New Mexico
You can help spread the flashings by ordering or purchasing a copy from your local indie bookstore or at bookshop.org; asking your library to carry it if they don’t, reviewing it on Amazon or Goodreads'; and recommending it far and wide to friends.
If you’re part of a book club, order 10 or more copies for your group and receive 30% off with code FLASHINGS30. Message me, and I’ll gladly zoom into your book club discussion!
With thanks! Spread the flashings!
xo katie
