Spokane, Washington
Congratulations Natalie!
Natalie’s Bio:
Natalie Wendt grew up in Idaho, graduated from College of Santa Fe in 2005, and traveled extensively Asia, Europe and North America. A former resident of Sravasti Abbey in Washington state, she now spends her days as a substitute teacher in Spokane’s elementary schools. Her writing has appeared in “Q View Northwest,” “The Fig Tree,” and “The Spokesman-Review.” This is the first contest she’s ever won.
Going Forth and Coming Home
When I was twenty-four, I moved into one of the world's only Buddhist monasteries for Westerners. Part of the Buddhist monastic ordination ceremony translates literarily to "going forth into homelessness." Buddhist monks and nuns are trained to interact with their environment without thinking of anything as a possession. Any "my" or "mine" are reduced to their robes and alms bowls. While I lived there, "my" room was anonymous in decor like any other in the monastery, none of it reflecting me. If a guest or visitor needed the small cabin where I slept, I got a roommate or spent the night on the wooden floor of the meditation hall. Everything I could call "mine" fit in two boxes.
The year before I moved into the monastery, I spent seven months traveling around the world, living out of a battered blue suitcase and an old backpack. It was a turtle existence, my world on my back. I trekked across India studying Buddhism, visited a cousin who worked for UNICEF in the Maldives, schlepped through Europe thanks to hostels and the couches of friends and extended family. Almost every week, I went to a new city, province, or country. Sometimes I accidentally started speaking the wrong language, my confused brain unable to keep up with my changing geography.
Nomadic life had been my dream for years. I grew up itching to escape my small north Idaho hometown. At eighteen, I fled to a hippie college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and at nineteen, I traded it for College of Santa Fe's painted deserts, artists, and eclectic melting pot of cultures. Santa Fe, New Mexico was a wonderful home for my student days, but as I set out into unsteady adulthood, I wanted to see who I was without anything familiar. I didn't go traveling or move to the monastery to find myself. I went to lose my old ideas about who I was or was supposed to be. Stripping home away, I could uncover my unquestioned assumptions.
For the most part, it worked. I'd grown up thinking I was shy, but I talked to strangers every day while I traveled. I'd been convinced that I was afraid to be alone, but I relished solitude in my gypsy life and in the silence of the monastery. Each place and experience forced me to try new ways of thinking and dealing with the world, to become someone who could exist in that environment, and amazingly, I did. I found new words for myself, and scrubbed old ones off like dead skin.
My devotion to Buddhism drew me to the monastery, but it wasn't just that. It was also the lure of an uprooted life in one place. The monastery was meant to challenge the easy habits of identity that play out in ordinary life. Monasticism is supposed to shake up how you see yourself. Living in community, meditating more than three hours a day, sharing almost everything with a dozen other people, and giving up control over your schedule, activities, even your meals, you find sides of yourself that you never knew existed.
Though I didn't ordain, I underwent the training, which brought unexpected results. During my several months of training, I was shocked to realize that I wanted to make a home as the new person I'd become. Despite believing myself a lover of the itinerant life, through living at the monastery, I saw that I actually wanted a home of my own, a job, and all the things I thought I didn't care about. So I did exactly what I'd practiced so many times before: I followed my heart.
That was six months ago. I'm now living in a small city and working in elementary schools. I like what I do, and even more, I like coming home. My walls are draped with saris I got in India, and my shelves burst with pictures and tokens from all the places I've been. The heart of my bedroom is an altar mirroring the one I sat in front of at the monastery, a small golden Buddha in the center. Looking around my apartment, I see all the things I've tried, and I know I couldn't have gotten here any other way. It was only through losing what I knew about myself that I found myself, only by going forth into homelessness that I found home.
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