The first thing I realized when I did a four-day retreat at the cabin last week was how speedy my mind is. It’s not easy to slow down but once I did, it felt like a mental vacation, like sitting at the beach and doing nothing but staring out at the waves coming in. Except at the cabin, it was watching the trees shake in the wind, while Mount Meeker remained perfectly still. It was seeing the clouds forming and reforming.
Although a retreat from the world sounded wonderful—especially turning off the daily assault of horrible news—it wasn’t easy being alone with my thoughts. Nor easy to shut them down: they have a way of crowding in, demanding attention. In my daily life, I’m always thinking about the next thing: preparing lunch, meeting a friend for a hike, going to my weekly yoga class.
But what happens when there is no next thing?— just an open-ended day with only a few requirements: make meals for myself, bring in more wood for the fire, wash the dishes. Other than that, it’s just sit, be aware of my breath, of everything happening around me.
Once I opened myself to the possibility that life is changing every second, and that I am part of the evolution, things got interesting. There’s the morning light streaming across the rock fireplace. And the wind howling so strong that I could almost regulate my breathing to its rhythm, like the receding and advancing of ocean waves.
I discovered that fixed thoughts don’t work. One morning, meditating while the light was still gray, I became happily aware that the sun had popped up from the east, painting one side of the ponderosa trunks with a warm yellow light. But as soon as I started making plans for a walk later in this welcome sunlight, I glanced up to see big, thick snowflakes coming down.
However, there’s no need for regret, for wishing the weather was other than it is, because the flakes are coming down so slowly and purposefully that I find myself getting lost in them, slowing my breathing with their descent.
Unexpectedly, the sun does come out later, but so do the strange clouds moving up from the east that partially obscure Mount Meeker (below) and other parts of the valley, like a game of hide and seek.
On my daily walks, I try to drop any game plan and let my feet take me where they want—down a driveway/road that leads to the ice-edged creek, over to an empty cabin where a white gauze curtain catches the sunlight, or to the edge of a meadow where the white aspen trunks are spotlighted in November’s unimpeded rays of sun. Over and over, I feel my feet on the earth, connecting me with something real.
At this time of the year, almost no one is around, just the occasional car passing by. Instead there’s a silence that fills me up, enters all the corners of my being that have been longing for this encompassing quiet without knowing it.
After four days, I return home where I make plans again. I turn on my computer and discover that alarming events happened while I was out of Internet range and realize they will keep happening whether I know about them or not. And I don't always notice the sky changing. But a part of me is still holding on to that silence and stillness for as long as possible.