Natalie Goldberg’s Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America Essay

Natalie Goldbergs Long Quiet Highway Waking Up in AmericaI put one acrosst think extremity is a creature, or a lady, like some people say. Its a tide of events sweeping us along. But Im not a Fatalist, because I believe you can swim against it, and sometimes grasp the hands of the clock face and steal a few precious minutes. If you dont youre just cartwheeled along. Before you know it, the magic opportunity is lost, and for the rest of your life it lingers on in that part of your mind which dreams the very outmatch dreamstaunting and tantalizing you with what might have been. (from the film Flirting, 1990) Every moment is enormous, and it is all we have (Goldberg xii). Natalie Goldberg offers her readers the opportunity to recognize the delicate nature of life and the sizeableness of slowing down ones life. In her autobiography, Long Quiet Highway Waking Up in America, she invites readers to journey along her path to waken in an effort as an author to pass on her breat h (22). By capturing her message and holding it close to ones heart, the reader grasps the nitty-gritty of Goldbergs message. It becomes clear that awakening can take on many forms and can be reached by different roads, but it is all centered on one goal to go within oneself and find inner peace and understanding. Through her exploration of America, teaching, spirituality, impermanence, and writing, and through her writing style and language, Goldberg sends her readers along their own long, bland highway. The main point one might gather from Goldbergs discussion of America is that Americans need to slow down all aspects of their lives, need to take the delicate components of life and make them significant. Goldberg sees an impatience in Ame... ...er to her affectionately as simply Natalie. In fact, it seems strange to refer to her as merely the author of a storeyshe has most assuredly transmitted her being through her writing, most definitely made a connection. There a re few times when she outwardly addresses the reader, so when she does, she calls attention to the importance of the event she is describing. Understand, she implores, causing the reader to sense the urgency and the great impact of what she is describing. When she describes Rinpoche as fluid energy (87), she wants readers to know this was really how she see him. Hers was a vital discovery, one of experiencing people. Natalie reaches readers. She cannot be disconnected from her work because hers is the breath we capture. Works Cited Goldberg, Natalie. Long Quiet Highway Waking Up in America. bleak York Bantam Books, 1993.