Letting Go

Guest blogger, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

I love to walk through the Golden Gate Park to the ocean. When I reach the water, I say, “The ocean looks like an aluminum roof,” or “The ocean looks like a snow lion,” or “The ocean is so big, as big as this strange feeling inside I cannot give a language.” I come to water with words for other words. Sometimes I say, “How is it possible for the ocean to be so beautiful?”

I do not carry a notepad or a pen on these walks.

While growing up in Nepal and India, my mother who was a practicing Buddhist in the way I am not, would allay my suffering over lost objects with strange logic. If an earring disappeared she would tell me it was all right. The lost earring had removed a bigger obstacle heading my way. Loss was a partial gain, a guard against bigger calamities. It was a strange but comforting acceptance of disappearance.

I wonder now if her philosophy has influenced the way I write. At the start of a year I turn to a new page of poems and for the rest of the year I write into that one document, adding line breaks to separate the days and the scattered thoughts. Once the document feels unwieldy, edit. I delete lines, I switch words around, I jump from page to page. My hundred pages dwindle to forty or fifty pages of poems.

I do not save copies. Whatever is deleted, leaves me. The lost words protect me. Against what? I do not know and it does not matter.

Every time that I sit down to write, I am letting go of something: an idea, a word, a metaphor, a feeling. I am not one person with one solid center so it feels right that words or my relationship with words and the words to their words should also change. Letting go enables me to reach something else, other words and worlds of words.

Does that make sense? Perhaps writing is not meant to make complete sense for some of us. I feel the process of writing is in many ways like being in a dream, where the illusion is us, not the dream. That we are the dream’s subjects and so the thing that is the dream comes from us but it is not given shape by us as far as we know and there is no fixed center that allows our dream a narrative or a self. We are not always who we think we are in our dreams. We are not always who we think we are in our lives as we live it. Should we allow our writing to be something expected then?

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the author of My rice tastes like the lake (forthcoming from Apogee Press), In the Absent Everyday and Rules of the House (Apogee Press). Rules of the House was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards in 2003. Tsering attended Lady Shri Ram College (Delhi University), University of Massachussetts and San Francisco State University. Her publications include two chapbooks, In Writing the Names (A.bacus, Potes & Poets Press) and Recurring Gestures (Tangram Press). She has received a Cultural Equity Grant from the Arts Commission of San Francisco, and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and Hedgebrook. Tsering grew up in the Tibetan exile communities of Nepal and India and now lives in San Francisco.

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