Dinty Moore

“Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about,” the novelist and memoirist Harry Crews reflected some years ago. “It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause — to look at them and make something of them.” That’s the writer’s job in a nutshell, to look “where you have to look.” Or as the brilliant poet Mary Oliver puts it, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

The truth, however, is that the practice of seeing sharply and authentically, feeling what is honestly there to be felt, opening ourselves to emotions and experiences we might otherwise avoid, is part of every art form. Actors, painters, dancers, and musical composers have their own concerns and terminology, but they know very well that exploration and discovery are necessary to make art. A final advantage of deliberate mindfulness is that it can help you to concentrate on your work — a true challenge in our modern, digital, gadget-driven world.

Being mindful of what distracts you, of what leads you to walk away from your writing desk, of the inner voice that chides “don’t bother, the work isn’t good enough,” is the first step to turning off those distractions, or voices, and getting the work done. It isn’t easy, but no one said it would be. Work is work, whether digging a ditch or, like the poet Seamus Heaney, digging in with your pen…

As the author of The Accidental Buddhist, a memoir exploring my potholed attempts to fit Buddhist practice and philosophy into a typically busy, overindulgent modern lifestyle, I am often asked to explain how the Dharma teachings have influenced my writing. Despite the frequency of the question, however, for many years I found myself unable to provide anything close to a satisfying answer. I knew that the Buddha’s core teachings had seeped deep into my life, in ways that I had not originally anticipated, but I could not honestly say that my writing habits had changed as a result, or that I had taken on a “Buddhist approach” to the highly deliberate routine of choosing words, composing sentences, and accumulating pages.

My work, it seemed, went on as it always had: ploddingly, unevenly, and with consistent difficulty. Yet the question — “You are a Buddhist, so can you tell us how your Buddhism affects your writing?” — kept returning, and I kept offering feeble and evasive responses. Then one day it occurred to me: my inability to articulate a satisfying reply might mean that I was, in fact, trying all along to answer the wrong question. It was not Buddhism that had influenced my writing, but quite the opposite.

The river of influence, perhaps, ran in the other direction. Rather than seeing mindfulness and Buddhism as shaping my efforts on the page, what I’ve come to understand is that my lifelong pursuit of writing and creativity helped to open me to the path of Buddhism. The innumerable lessons learned in struggling with my writing over the years had made me aware (albeit in an inarticulate, subconscious way) of the simple wisdom of mindfulness and nonattachment presented in the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths.”
~ Dinty W. Moore, The Mindful Writer

"We were supposed to be thinking about Jesus, how he had died for our sins and could save us again from our adolescent weakness, but I was thinking about Mary Margaret Flatley. Mary Margaret was the Catholic Youth recruiter for Mercyhurst Girl’s High School. She was beautiful. I imagined that if she saw how devout I was, she would want to lose her virginity to me.

I prayed fervently all weekend, and when it came time to tell the assembled group about what was in our minds, I tried hard to sound deep and soulful. “There is so much good inside of people,” I whispered. “If only we just loved one another.” Any number of young Catholic girls decided over those three days that I was a great guy, very sincere, and sweet.

Not one of them, of course, had any interest in dating me. I was stuck talking to Brother Damien. Brother Damien was the youngest of the monks, probably in his thirties, and he somehow knew that my parents were divorced, that my father had a drinking problem going back twenty years, and that I was bright, eager, and fit in nowhere.

Maybe everybody is massively insecure at age fifteen, but I wore my insecurity on my sleeve. He took me aside late Saturday afternoon. “I’ve been noticing you,” he said, out of earshot of the others. “They call you Dinty, but your name should be Peter, like the Apostle, because you are a rock. Do you know that?” I think I nodded. “You are very strong. I can sense it. There is a rock inside of you.” I nodded again.

I had noticed the rock. I thought it was everything wrong about me, all my faults and deficiencies balled up and ready to explode, but Brother Damien made it sound like something good. “That rock is your faith,” he went on. “That rock is the faith that keeps you strong. You are going to do great things.”

The monk took my breath away. He looked right at me, not averting his gaze, not nervously shuffling off. He just looked at me and waited. No priest or monk had ever paid such attention to me before. I don’t think any adult had ever paid such attention to me.

Brother Damien was a man of God, so in a sense, it was God paying attention to me. We were just off the chapel, and I could hear the other monks reciting their Latin prayers. It was the most religious moment of my life." -- Dinty Moore, The Accidental Buddhist