Choosing Kindness

Sarah Ruhl: For me, there’s always a coziness about reading with an adult as a kid. And you feel held, ideally, by the book and by the reader. And maybe that’s something that you don’t get when you just tell a kid to sit by themselves on a cushion or whatever. They’re little for that. But if they’re being sort of held in a cozy way and you’re trying to teach them, “Oh, that scary thought you had, if you look at it differently, it can evaporate.”

James Shaheen: Hello, I’m James Shaheen, and this is Life As It Is. I’m here with my co-host Sharon Salzberg, and you just heard Sarah Ruhl. Sarah is a playwright, poet, and professor based in New York, and she and Sharon both recently published their first children’s books. Sarah’s book, The Dreams I’ll Dream Tonight, is a whimsical bedtime story, while Sharon’s book, Kind Karl: A Little Crocodile with Big Feelings, follows a young crocodile as he learns to control his temper. In our conversation today, we talk about what inspired each of them to write children’s books, the importance of imagination in helping children work through fear, how we can choose where we place our attention, and how they’ve each adapted teachings on loving-kindness to a younger audience. Plus, Sarah and Sharon each read excerpts from their new books. So here’s our conversation with Sarah Ruhl.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with writer and playwright Sarah Ruhl and my cohost Sharon Salzberg. Hi, Sarah. Hi, Sharon. It’s great to be with you both.

Sarah Ruhl: Hello.

Sharon Salzberg: Hi there.

James Shaheen: So, Sarah, you’re in the middle of rehearsals right now, is that right?

Sarah Ruhl: Yes, I am rehearsing for a new musical called Wonder that’s based on a children’s book actually, speaking of children’s books.

James Shaheen: Oh, really, it’s based on a children’s book. So when does this open, or when do you expect it to open?

Sarah Ruhl: We go to ART in Cambridge on December 17th, and it’s, I guess it’s a YA book. It’s about a little boy named Augie who has a cranial facial difference, and he goes to school for the first time, and it’s about how he navigates the challenges of being at school for the first time. And it actually reminds me of our conversation to come because there’s a song in it called “Choose Kind.” It’s kind of an anti-bullying book.

James Shaheen: Well, who writes the music for that?

Sarah Ruhl: It’s a wonderful duo called A Great Big World.

James Shaheen: Great. Well, that sounds great. Somehow between rehearsals and writing an essay collection, you also managed to publish a children’s book, which we’re going to talk about today, as did Sharon. This is your first children’s book, is that right? 

Sarah Ruhl: Yes

James Shaheen: OK, well, congratulations. Sharon also recently wrote her first children’s book.

James Shaheen: So we thought it would be nice to do an episode with the two of you together. So first of all, how did you each decide to write a children’s book?

Sarah Ruhl: Sharon, why don’t you start?

Sharon Salzberg: OK. Well, my first book was called Lovingkindness. It was published by Shambhala Publications in 1995, and they’ve, I think fairly recently, started a line of children’s books, Bala Books, and they approached me and said, “Would you like to help create a book based on the theories and the practices of loving-kindness?” They have an author they’ve worked with a lot, Jason Gruhl, and so they paired us up and we created this book. It was really fun trying to imagine who’s the main character, and that became Karl the crocodile, who learns how to be kind. So it was really a fun process.

Sarah Ruhl: I can’t wait. I just think that book needs to be in the world, and I’ll be giving it to all of my friends with kids.

Sharon Salzberg: Oh, thank you.

Sarah Ruhl: And my book I started a long time ago with my son William, who was then probably 6 years old, and it’s called The Dreams I’ll Dream Tonight. It was inspired by my own difficulties going to sleep when I was little, and then putting three of my own kids to sleep or to bed at night. And I had the idea of thinking about what you might dream of and what you might not dream of at night. There’s a beautiful Wallace Stevens poem where he talks about how he’s not going to dream of baboons and periwinkle, and I was thinking of that poem too, and thinking about how can you imagine what you won’t dream of? I was the kid who’d be up till four in the morning thinking that the pile of laundry on the bed was a monster or thinking that a cat swishing its tail was a thief crouched over with a knife. You know, I had an overactive imagination. So the book was a way of trying to offer children and parents a kind of ritual before bed.

James Shaheen: You know, as much as the story, the illustrations are important in the books. They’re children’s books, so they always are. Why don’t you each say what it was like to work with the illustrator?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, to my surprise, the construct was that, at least in my case, was that the illustrator is an independent artist that is working for Shambhala Publications. And so it was an intricate process to make sure we were all in service of the same story. But it was lovely. Shambhala hired this amazing illustrator who lives in France, and my main commentary on what he was presenting was Karl the crocodile goes through a metamorphosis, and there’s a revelation to him about the power of kindness. And what I said through Shambhala to the illustrator was I think he looked really just as cranky after as he did before. Maybe he needs to look a little sweeter after he has this big revelation. And the illustrator kind of got that, and he’s really got such a sweet face now, post-revelation.

Sarah Ruhl: That’s a good challenge for an artist, how to make a crocodile look sweet. And similarly with my book, I had been looking forward to this robust collaboration with an artist because I love collaborating with visual artists. But similarly, I think that’s just the way they do it with most children’s books. They really streamline it and compartmentalize so that the editor goes back and forth between the writer of the text and the visual artist. So I helped choose Sally Deng. I had worked with her on a portrait and I loved her work, and I just thought she was really the right match because she had this, you could really see her hand print in the lines of the drawings, and she had a kind of whimsy and beauty and wasn’t particularly realistic, which was also important to me, and the kind of tenderness in her quality. But it really was all telepathy because we weren’t supposed to talk. I guess they do that to protect the vision of the artist and not have writers be pesky or something.

Sharon Salzberg: Probably.

Sarah Ruhl: Yeah, but I was so taken with all the detail she found that was nothing that was in the text. For example, there’s a panel that says, “Tonight I’ll dream about a dream inside a dream,” and she had concocted all of these beautiful detailed dreams inside a dream that were all from her imagination. So for me, it was a total delight.

James Shaheen: It’s funny, you say they compartmentalize the illustrator. You know, we work with a lot of illustrators, and only the art director talks to the illustrator. The rest of us are sort of sealed off. They don’t want

Sharon Salzberg: It was a whole new world for me. I was like, wow, that’s so interesting.

James Shaheen: I’m very used to it. They don’t want pesky editors tinkering. You know, we can say something doesn’t quite work, but we can’t tell them how to fix it. 

Sarah Ruhl: Right, right.

James Shaheen: Yeah, they know how to fix it. So, Sarah, what was it like working with your son on writing the book?

Sarah Ruhl: Well, my son, when he was little, was just such a natural collaborator, always at my elbow, making up his own stories. And so I would ask him, “What are some things you’d want to dream of? What are some things you would not want to dream of?” And the book went through several iterations. So I don’t know how many of the very first draft remained. It’s such a long process to make a children’s book that, you know, now he’s 15.

James Shaheen: Mmhmm.

Sarah Ruhl: So the germ, the seed came a long time ago, but I love writing poems with my kids or writing stories with my kids.

James Shaheen: Interesting. So in different ways, the books each focus on working with fear and noticing the ways that the stories we tell about ourselves or our worlds might be limiting or constricting. So can you talk about that theme? Does that make sense? 

Sarah Ruhl: Sharon, you’re the master of that, so please.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you! Well, I love the fact, Sarah, that you worked with your son. And I have just in my possession at this moment a few author copies of the book, and a friend came to visit me in Barre, and she has a son who’s maybe like 10 or 11 years old, something like that. So I gave her a copy of the book and I said, you know, don’t insult him by saying it’s for him because it’s really for younger kids, but I’d be really curious as to his take on what a younger kid might get from it. And apparently he wrote me a whole review, which was great. And he really liked having a book pre-publication. That was really a big thing. But one of the main sort of turning points for Karl the crocodile in the book is when he realizes that his thoughts, which were very self-deprecating and kind of nasty about himself and a little hopeless, like, “I can never change, crocodiles can’t change,” that those thoughts could be almost placed in a cloud and drift away. And that, along with some of the illustrations, like the crocodile has hair, which he likes to comb, he liked that a lot, but that passage and the illustrations of these really kind of troublesome, fearful, apprehensive, hopeless thoughts could be placed in clouds and they can drift away. And then you can choose, crocodile or person, where are you going to put your energy? And it’s very creative. And it struck me that he, as a really little kid, liked so much that particular thing. It’s like he got it. And that, of course, is how we want to work with fear. It’s not putting ourselves down or demanding we not feel it, you know, it’s really like, “Oh yeah, I see you. I see you for what you are, and let’s put you in a cloud.” Or sometimes I use in meditation instruction, how about a hot air balloon? You know, send it off.

Sarah Ruhl: Well, I was just thinking how wonderful to have that technique available to children. I think that there’s so many Westerners who come to Buddhism sort of late in life and learn some of these technologies of happiness or wisdom late in life. And what if you had them when you were 4 or 5 or 6? Amazing.

Sharon Salzberg: It would be incredible, huh?

James Shaheen: You know, Sarah, you know, when I was a kid, if I was having nightmares, the advice given to me was, “Oh, it’s not real. Don’t worry. It’s not real.” Of course, for the child, it is real. So in your book, the technique to work with fear is to dream of something else or to say, “I won’t dream of this, I’ll dream of that,” and to sort of prepare the mind to dream of other things. Can you say something about that?

Sarah Ruhl: Well, what’s funny about it is it was very intuitive to me, and it was partly just formally a study in contrast. And then I found out, my husband’s a child psychiatrist, and I showed him the text of it and he’s like, “Oh, that’s really interesting. There’s actually a child psychiatrist who has a model for fear of going to sleep where you rehearse what dream you want to have.” So I thought, oh, so it’s actually a thing. And in the last page, I have a place for you to write in, “Tonight, I’ll dream of . . . Tonight I won’t dream of . . .” And of course they’re very clear that I couldn’t say to write in this book because for librarians, that’s anathema. So I had to say, you know, that you’ll say it out loud.

And I remember one challenge I had in the writing process was when I first wrote the book, I would include some pretty scary dreams that I had as a child, like “I won’t dream of vampires,” or whatever, and the editor was like, “You can’t have something that scary in a book for kids,” And I was like, “Oh god, OK,” so it would be tigers. But I remember hearing about Maurice Sendak’s process. Maybe I went to a talk he gave, and I guess some of his books were really controversial when he was alive, because he would use really scary imagery, like in In the Night Kitchen, apparently he’s literally referencing crematoriums. You wouldn’t know it, but that was some of his reference points. And Where the Wild Things Are people thought was way too scary in terms of the monsters. And of course, kids’ imaginations have all that scary stuff already. You’re not putting it inside their heads. They already imagine really scary monsters.

So, I don’t know. Your initial question was about fear and now I’m going off on many tangents, but yeah, I was a fearful child around sleep, probably more fearful than my own children, and I think reading helped me a lot. As a kid, I loved children’s books. I would sleep with certain children’s books under my pillow. And I think there is something about the act of narration, or you might say rehearsal, that’s really helpful.

James Shaheen: So, you know, both of you write about choosing where we place our attention in the books, or really our kindness and our love. Sharon, this has been a big theme of your work for decades. So how did you think about adapting loving-kindness for a younger audience? And after you answer, maybe you can read a little bit from the book, and then I’ll ask Sarah too.

Sharon Salzberg: Well, some years ago, I consulted a little bit with Richie Davidson and his team at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who were trying to create a curriculum of loving-kindness for younger children that they were then going to do research on. And actually I think if you register now that the research is completed, if you register on his website, you can access this curriculum, which is very interesting. And what I discovered in that work is that I really needed to get concrete, you know, and almost see the world as a child. It was fascinating. So for example, when we do loving-kindness meditation, we often silently repeat phrases that are the ways we are paying attention differently, phrases like, “May you be safe, may you be happy.” Instead of, you know, going through our grievance one more time, or whatever it might be, we do choose to place our attention on something that is more like gift-giving, and I realized through the work that, oh, we can’t just have a child repeat “May you be safe.” It was like, what does safe feel like? And we would use examples like if you have to cross a scary or a busy street and someone holds your hand, that’s the feeling of safety. And so that’s what, throughout this story and the meditations and practices that are in the back, I tried to remember that lesson and that it’s not just like an adult in a littler body, you know? It’s a certain way of seeing the world, and that was so wonderful.

Sarah Ruhl: That’s so beautiful that that image of someone holding your hand as you cross the street and the idea of how concretely you can teach these ideas to kids. I’d be so curious to read that whole curriculum from Madison.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah. I forget the name of it. It’s the Center for Healthy Minds, or something like that.

Sarah Ruhl: Mm-hmm.

James Shaheen: You know, one of the interesting things is as I was reading these books, I actually really enjoyed them. And for our listeners, if you have small children or have friends who have small children, I think we all do, they’re great books. They really convey teachings that we’re familiar with, and they’re really appropriate to young children. And one of the interesting things for me is that I read a lot about meditation for children, and it’s a controversial field, and a lot of people, you know, whether at the University of Wisconsin, or somebody wrote a feature for us on this they, they explained that there were lots of different opinions about the wisdom of teaching children meditation. And I remember when my nephew was maybe 6, he said, “I want to learn meditation,” and so I sat him down, and within a few seconds he said, “This is creepy.” And he got up, and he left. But if I’d had a children’s book like these two, it’s a very different experience. It’s sort of meeting the child where a child is. And that the example of crossing the street, Sharon, was really apt because children in fact have to cross a busy street. And when they hold someone’s hand, there’s a feeling of safety. So both of these books seemed to really offer comfort using teachings that we as adults practice, and in fact, at the end of your book, Sharon, there’s a loving-kindness meditation, and so I thought it was just really a way, an apt way to deliver these teachings to people that age, because meditation, I mean, if my experience with my nephew is any example, a lot of them think, “Oh, this is creepy,” but this is very soothing. And it gives them a kind of courage or empowerment. In both books, there’s a real sense of courage and empowerment, changing the qualities we choose to cultivate. So could you talk about that? And maybe each of you could read a little bit from the book after you do. Sarah, why don’t we begin with you?

Sarah Ruhl: OK. Maybe I’ll start by reading, because that will remind me of the book. I feel like I could show it to you, but we’re on audio, so it won’t matter for our listeners. Do you want us just to read a little, like a little excerpt?

James Shaheen: Sure.

Sarah Ruhl: OK. “Read just one more book to me, the way you always do. Then I won’t dream of dragons. Instead, I’ll dream of you. Tonight I won’t have nightmares, no bad dreams for me. Instead, I’m going to dream about a hippo sipping tea. And I won’t dream of lizards turning into bears. I’ll dream of apples on the ceiling and plums that turn to pears. And I won’t dream of monsters hiding by that chair. That monster was a kitten. His tail was in the air.”

So just from that little bit, I’m just thinking about reframing our thoughts. You know, it’s partly about perception. You know, the thing you thought was a monster was just a kitten and his tail was in the air. And I think for me, there’s always a coziness about reading with an adult as a kid. And you feel held, ideally, by the book and by the reader. And maybe that’s something that you don’t get when you just tell a kid to sit by themselves on a cushion or whatever. They’re little for that. But if they’re being sort of held in a cozy way and you’re trying to teach them, “Oh, that scary thought you had, if you look at it differently, it can evaporate.”

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, it’s lovely. Now I wanna be read to the rest of the time.

Sarah Ruhl: Right.

James Shaheen: I know, I know. I think everybody likes to be read to. Yeah.

Sharon Salzberg: So, in an earlier passage in the book, Karl the crocodile has a pretty bad day at school. He misspells a word and he feels really humiliated and stuff. 

“Back home, Karl felt pretty deflated. Nobody likes me, he thought. I’m stupid, he thought. Crocodiles just can’t be kind, he thought. But then he paused. Where did those thoughts come from? Those ideas weren’t true. I had three friends show up for my birthday party. I can do fractions standing on my head. And I help my mom brush her teeth every night!, which is a great illustration. As Karl noticed this, he pictured the thoughts drifting away on clouds: ‘I’m stupid,’ ‘Nobody likes me,’ ‘Crocodiles can’t be kind.’ See you later, alligators, which is a pretty funny pun. Just picturing this made Karl feel better. After that, Karl started to question more thoughts in his mind, and he decided to be a little kinder to himself. When he felt sad, he took care of that sad part of himself. Sometimes he jumped on his trampoline. Sometimes he made drawings using all the crayons in the box. And sometimes he just cried, and that was okay. When he felt all tight in his body, he thanked his body for telling him. “Thanks, body!” he’d say. And then he’d comb his hair for about five minutes, which usually calmed him down. And when he got an ‘almost, but not quite’ at school, he didn’t call himself names. He patted himself on the cheek (when no one was looking) and whispered, ‘You did your best today, and you can try again next time.’ ”

And then it goes on from there.

Sarah Ruhl: That’s so great.

James Shaheen: This is after he has struggled with his temper. I like the little touches, like he has a tuft of mammalian hair on the top of his head,

Sharon Salzberg: I know. It’s so cute.

James Shaheen: Or he misspells the word crepe, which is his favorite food and he actually knows how to spell it, but in the moment he blows it. But he tells stories about himself that he learns to let go of.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, he learned to dispel those stories.

James Shaheen: Yeah.

James Shaheen: Both books are really a lot of fun. I’m wondering what you’re hoping that children and their caregivers will get out of the books. There’s something about, you know, having a parent read you, or I guess not always a parent, but having a parent read you a book that does something, not only about soothing the child, but I found when I was reading books to my nephews and nieces when they were very young. It also soothed me. You know, it really calmed me down.

Sarah Ruhl: I mean, my most literal hope for the book is that it makes bedtime more sweet for some kids and helps them go to sleep more swiftly and more sweetly, you know, that it can dispel some anxiety about bedtime and be a good ritual for both the parent and the kid.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, and you know, listening to you, James, talk about your nephew reminded me of when my goddaughter was maybe like 7 years old, 8 years old, maybe. She went to a Quaker school, a Friends school, and so they had an assembly once a week where everyone in the community would just sit in silence for some minutes, and one day I was at her house and I said to her, “What do you do in those minutes? Like, what’s going on?” And she said, “I just think about stuff.” And I said, “Well, would you like to learn how to meditate?” And she said, “Sure.” So we went upstairs with her mom, and we did two kinds of meditation. One was a kind of foundational mindfulness exercise of feeling the breath, but you know, with a kid, you might have them put their hand on their abdomen, or as people like Susan Kaiser Greenland have encouraged, maybe you have them lie down with a little stuffed animal on their belly and watch it go up and down. But we did just sitting up some mindfulness of breath, and then I taught her some loving-kindness meditation. And then at the end of the whole thing, her mom said to her, “Which one did you like better?” And she said, “That loving-kindness thing,” you know, which I really appreciated. And I remembered when I was a child the injunction to pray at night before you went to sleep, which didn’t always work, and I know so many families who were trying to introduce a nighttime loving-kindness practice because it’s a remembrance of all our connections. When I was doing that thing for Richie, you know, I would suggest things like how about call to mind somebody you really care about, a teacher, a parent, a friend, somebody like that. And we’d move on to like, how about a kid that you usually like but you’re mad at right now, you know, and offering those phrases to them. And so, that’s what I would hope is that an actual practice for a family, for a community, can come together around the idea of connection and all that that entails.

James Shaheen: Yeah. You know, reading these books, it was a lot of fun, you know, and I read them each a few times.

Sharon Salzberg: Did you read them at night to go to sleep?

James Shaheen: I read them, they were both times I read them, actually were in the evening. I read them again last night, but it wasn’t right before I went to sleep. But you know what it reminded me of? It reminded me of, I was trying to think, what was my imagination like when I was a kid, and it was so much stronger, and the line between the so-called real world and my imagination would blur a bit, especially at nighttime. And I wonder if you could both talk a little bit about imagination and storytelling. Sarah, certainly you’re familiar with storytelling, you’ve written plenty, and Sharon, you’re always telling stories. So, imagination and storytelling. It’s just that I really was thinking about what was it like, because it was so vivid and so strong as a child. And that can sometimes come back to you as you’re reading these books and remembering the books. I remember the books I read as a child and how vivid it was. 

Sarah Ruhl: Well, I was a big reader as a kid, and some of my favorite books were these Betsy-Tacy books, which interestingly enough were not, they were very real. Like they were these books that Maud Hart Lovelace told stories to her child about her upbringing in Minnesota, and then she eventually made stories out of them. Did you ever read them as a kid, Sharon?

Sharon Salzberg: No, I didn’t.

Sarah Ruhl: They’re very sweet. And I think for me, they felt so real that they almost felt like your own friends at a point, and you sort of grow up with them. And they made me feel so safe and cozy, and when I was lonely or felt friendless, I felt like I had these friends on the page.

I think my imagination must have been a little too vivid or wild at bedtime, and I would worry that my parents would die in their sleep, you know, stuff like that. Like not sweet, not kind of nice little fantasies, but like, oh, what if one of my parents dies in their sleep? I would go check and see if they were still breathing.

It’s funny, I’m just flashing on when I was at summer camp for the first time and I would feel anxious to be away from home. I was raised Catholic, so I knew how to pray, but I wasn’t a big prayer-before-bed kind of person or anything like that. But before bed, I came up with this little routine at summer camp where I would just say to myself, I would picture each person who is important in my life, and I would say, “May they be safe and well,” which, when I learned metta as a grownup, I thought, oh, that’s very similar actually. I didn’t know to do it for my enemies or for the neutral person, but somehow it felt intuitive to me to wish that for people I loved and cared about who weren’t present in my company at that time.

And maybe that’s partly what the child is learning, you know, when your safe object, when your safe person isn’t there, isn’t present, isn’t around, how can you feel safe? And for me, stories helped with that.

Sharon Salzberg:Yeah I think, especially, you know, when there’s a lot of adversity, there’s a lot of challenge, how we tell the story is going to either reveal a path or have us feel defined by those circumstances. And so I would say in my own childhood, it was something, you know, some kind of sense of possibility—where it came from, I can’t really say, but that kept me going throughout really challenging and difficult circumstances.

And it wasn’t like I pictured, you know, green meadows or something, or rainbows and things like that. But there was just some kind of knowing that this story could be told differently, that it could end in a different way. And it was vital to have that kind of intuition. And so there’s a big connection in my mind between intuition and imagination and storytelling.

This is very different than a kind of overdetermined forcing yourself to look on the bright side or, you know, think how great things will be someday. It was very different than that. It was much more subtle, but it was very present. And I think about that thread, which really did keep me going through all kinds of problems.

Sarah Ruhl: Did you have a favorite book as a little kid?

Sharon Salzberg: I don’t remember reading as a little kid in that way, but I remember as I got older, you know, I was reading Nancy Drew, and I was reading, was it Cherry Ames who was the nurse? And, you know, those kinds of adventures, like look at what that girl did, you know, which was really great.

James Shaheen: So I wonder, Sarah, you know, you work so much with the imagination. You create stories, you write plays, you’ve written books, as has Sharon. I wonder if you ever draw from the imagination or think about your imagination when you were a child or how you allow that imagination to unfold. Because I think in adulthood so often we become not callous, but just a little bit less sympathetic to the imagination.

Sarah Ruhl: I think it’s a challenge as a grownup artist to keep that portal open, but I think that’s the thing, keeping that continuity with the child is really important as an artist. I mean, obviously you want to do some growing up too, so that you’re not a complete pain in the ass to live with, but for me, the kid I was and how that kid imagined feels very much continuous with who I am when I sit at a desk now.

I was helping my mom clean out a storage closet recently, and unfortunately, or fortunately, she kept everything, and so I could go back to all these childhood stories that I had been working on. And it was bizarrely always sort of my work. I was always writing little stories or telling stories about my day. It seemed like important work to me from a young age. So definitely I still go through periods as a grownup artist where I feel less connected to that, or the slings and arrows of quote unquote show business are changing my focus away from that kid, you know? But I think that’s the place I return to again and again.

James Shaheen: Sharon, I wanted to mention that you said that your childhood dream was to become a playwright, which of course we know that Sarah is.

Sarah Ruhl: Do it!

Sharon Salzberg: I guess, maybe.

James Shaheen: And you know, when you first taught me metta, it required imagination. I mean, I really had to say, What if I could have these feelings for that person? I mean, I just had to try and cultivate it by acting as if. But can you tell us about your desire to become a playwright? I mean, I think you have a great imagination. And is it still a dream of yours? Sarah just offered you some encouragement, so go ahead and talk about what that, imagine what that life might be like.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you, Sarah. Well, it’s funny for me talking to each of you because I’d say I had two dreams. One was to, you know, if people ask me as a child, what would you like to be when you grow up? I’d say a playwright. Why? Who knows? You know, usually, if I’m writing about it, I say a writer, but actually it was more specific than that. I wanted to be a playwright. I must have read something about being a playwright. I don’t even know what it meant. Probably, you know. It was so weird.

And then as I got older, I had this desire—it didn’t die until a little while ago—to go to journalism school, which was really funny. James, once you gave me a press pass to write about something, this event that was happening at the Columbia journalism school. So I went in and registered at the desk, and the young girl behind the desk said something to me, and I said, You know, I’d always wanted to go to journalism school. And she said something like, it’s not too late. Really old people come too, or something like that. And I was like—

James Shaheen: Really old people.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, I guess I’m not gonna do that. And it’s very funny because sometimes talking to journalists, they say, “You really don’t wanna go to journalism school. It’s better just to write.” But I think for part of the journalism dream, it was something about telling the truth, being dispassionate around not having an agenda, just wanting to portray the truth. And in terms of the playwright, it’s dazzling to me that someone can create a universe, with characters and dialogues and scenery, and it’s like really something out of nothing. And it’s just amazing to me. So maybe someday.

Sarah Ruhl: Yes, I really want you to write a play. And I think that all a play is is dialogue, and you’re in dialogue with people all the time. So it’s just a very long conversation that theoretically has some story that moves it forward. But I think you’d write a play in a snap.

James Shaheen: How different is it? I mean, I know writing a children’s book is very different from the work that you do in your everyday life. But how different is doing something like this and, say, writing a play, Sarah?

Sarah Ruhl: For me, I write in a lot of different genres, and it’s always sort of the same impulse, and the form is different. I guess if I was a seamstress and I was sewing pants one day instead of a shirt, the form is different, but the impulse to sew or make sense of things with words feels pretty much the same.

When my kids were little and I put them to bed, I had this little thing I made up called Boat of Dreams, where I would say, “OK, we’re all getting in a boat,” or I would say it in the third person, like, “William gets in a boat and Hope gets in a boat, and they go here.” And then I would just make up a story about where the boat went and all the fantastical things that happened inside the boat, and then there’d be a return home. And by the end of it, we were usually all of us asleep. And what was interesting to me about it is I never got what is known as writer’s block doing this because the intent was so important to make the child fall asleep. And there was always a story available. And so I guess I offer that to other people who are writing. And that’s how I feel, I guess, when I’m working on a kid’s book or anything else, that the story’s always available if you just kind of watch it unfold. And it helps even more if you have a mission like putting a child to sleep.

James Shaheen: Yeah, Sharon, you know, you’re teaching adults all the time, and here you are, conveying these same teachings to a child. And I have to admit, when I was reading Kind Karl, I was thinking, I’m still doing that.

Sharon Salzberg: With your thoughts?

James Shaheen: With my thoughts, telling stories, or why did I do that? It’s not misspelling a word necessarily, but it’s missing something and thinking, How could I miss that?, and wanting to be perfect and all of these different things. So the lessons are the same. You seem to just have figured out how to teach these same lessons to children. So how different is it?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, you know, I think it is basically the same, as you say. In terms of the heart and the mind, I think there can be a real frankness and vulnerability with children, which is very refreshing. You know, they’re not so armored or defensive. And I think the essential response that’s so important is to allow the feelings one has to arise, not getting consumed by them or, on the other hand, rejecting them and hating yourself in some way for what’s going on, and that’s going to hold true for any age.

You know, I remember so many times teaching with our friend Mark Epstein, who’s a psychiatrist, and his favorite mentor to quote was Winnicott, who was a British psychoanalyst, and one of Winnicott’s famous sayings was to be a good enough mother. In terms of the gender thing, Mark would say the people who were presenting with the child at his institute were women, but you could say “good enough parent.” But the phrase was to be a good enough mother, and somebody in the room would always raise their hand and say, “What’s a good enough mother?” And Mark would say, “Someone who could survive their child’s rage.” And someone would say, “What does it mean to survive your child’s rage?” And Mark would say to not get overinvolved and consumed by it, invasive, in other words, and not to stand back and withdraw or be critical. It’s someplace in the middle where you’re fully present, acknowledging, and you have neither of those reactions.

So I would then always say, “That’s mindfulness. That’s what we call mindfulness.” And so I think one of the interesting things about working with children is that we’re teaching a child more and more to have that skill, but we’re also opening up that door to the whole family in a way. Or maybe it’s a constellation of teachers or friends of the family, something like that. I think many adults, just hearing about it or maybe reading the book out loud or something, are reminded of that skill as well.

James Shaheen: Before we close, anything else?

Sarah Ruhl: I have an assignment for Sharon if she would like to take it. I once was on an Amtrak train and ran into Lama Pema Wangdak. Do you know him? I had studied with him a little bit, and he had come to see us at Lincoln Center when we were working on this play, The Oldest Boy, and he told me he thought there should be a play for young people about the life of the Buddha using some of the animal tales.

Sharon Salzberg: Oh, the jataka stories.

Sarah Ruhl: Yeah, and he said, you know, because other world religions like Christianity have these pageants for kids to do, you know, like the manger story or whatever, and you can learn by being in those plays, but we don’t have that. So he said you should write one. Well, all these years I haven’t written one, but I think you should write one.

Sharon Salzberg: Oh God.

James Shaheen: Are you going to take on that assignment, Sharon?

Sharon Salzberg: Well, I have a prior assignment if we’re talking about writing a play, but this is very interesting, because this could have a lot of pageantry. I wonder if there’s a Buddhist community.

Sarah Ruhl: Or puppets. 

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah. Well, you know, for whatever presentations, as you know, Sarah, I said, I don’t want to be excruciatingly boring if I’m presenting the book. And I asked Sarah for some advice about, what do you do besides read the book and hold it up? And people have suggested things to me like stencils of Karl with crayons for kids, and someone suggested a puppet, which I thought would be very fun.

Sarah Ruhl: Yes, crocodile puppets. Absolutely.

James Shaheen: OK. Well, it was great talking to you both. It’s been a great pleasure. So for our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of The Dreams I’ll Dream Tonight by Sarah Ruhl, and Kind Karl by Sharon Salzberg, our co-host. They’re both available now. We typically close these podcasts with a guided meditation, so I’ll turn this over to you, Sharon.

Sharon Salzberg: Great. Thank you. And thank you so much, Sarah. So in the back of the book I have different exercises like a gratitude exercise and really a sympathetic joy exercise, feeling happiness for the happiness of others. But this is the foundational loving-kindness. So we can do some of this together. It’s titled, “Loving-Kindness Meditation for Kids.”

The skill of meditation is the ability to let go and begin again, over and over . . . and there is no such thing as failing. Just like Karl, we can observe our thoughts and choose what we want to focus on. This meditation repeats phrases that we want for ourselves and for others. It is a way of being a friend to ourselves and of sending love and kindness out into the world. For each of the phrases you say, try and think of a time when you felt that way. For example, when you say, “May I be safe,” think about a time when someone was holding your hand as you crossed the street. Can you feel it? Put your hand on your heart and send that feeling of safety to yourself. 

To start, lie down or sit on a meditation cushion or chair and get comfortable. Begin to take some deep breaths through your nose, then allow your breath to become natural. You can start to think about the good within you or your wish to be happy for one minute.

Once you’re more relaxed, place one hand on your heart and repeat these phrases out loud, over and over without rushing, and feel each of them in your body. May I be safe. May I be healthy. May I be happy. May I be peaceful.

Spend a few moments in silence at the end of this meditation, resting in the feeling of safety, health, happiness, and peace you’ve created.

Once you’ve learned these phrases, you can also send these good wishes out to others, sending them to parents, family, friends, people in your community, and strangers. It’s even possible to send this love and kindness out to the whole world. Repeat the exercise above for each of the groups, pausing after each one to really let your intentions travel to that person or group of people. Place one hand on your heart and repeat these phrases out loud, over and over again without rushing, and feel each of them in your body. Why don’t you choose one? Parents or family or friends? What comes to mind? May you be safe. May you be healthy. May you be happy. May you be peaceful.

Spend a few moments in silence at the end of this meditation, resting in the feeling of safety, health, happiness, and peace you’ve created. So thank you.

James Shaheen: Thank you Sharon, and thank you Sarah. It’s great seeing you both.

Sarah Ruhl: Thank you for that beautiful meditation.

Sharon Salzberg: Oh, well, thank you. Thank you for the inspiration.

James Shaheen: And the assignment.

Sharon Salzberg: And the assignment.

Sarah Ruhl: All right. See you both soon, I hope.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Life As It Is with Sarah Ruhl. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks and Life As It Is is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!