Cabin Journal

Retreat from the World

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.

Just Waiting

In these tempestuous autumn days leading up to winter, the weather changes quickly, at the drop of a hat—or, in this case, a snowflake. Last week, temperatures close to 70 were followed by snow. Monday at the cabin, the air temperature was a frigid 22 degrees with a fine cold mist dissolving from the sky, coating the landscape in fragile ice.

The red rosehips had a shiny glaze, while every blade of the tall golden grasses was outlined in white frost, showing off the different patterns of the seedheads—dangling, feathered or spread out like fingers. The hillsides of green pines were dusted with snow, while the bare branches of the aspens and willows were stippled with ice. Graded shades of pale spread across the fields and hillsides.

The creeks were still running but everything else was still, hushed. With Meeker Park sealed in by the low clouds, it felt like the world had shrunk to this small valley, the landscape frozen in time. I hardly dared breathe to disturb it.

But two days later, the sun returned and so did the winds, with gusts of 80 mph. The whole world was shaken loose again, moving in such extreme ways it made me uneasy. On my afternoon walk, I found tall ponderosas snapped in half, and I said a silent prayer for the still standing pine trees. I know they must bend in order to withstand these unreasonable winds, but even the most flexible must ultimately yield to forces beyond their control.

The day before, on the Cub Lake trail in Rocky Mountain National Park (right), fall was nudging into winter. The ponds in the valley bottom were partly rimmed with ice, and the grasses, not yet battered by snow, were bleached of all color—and seemingly life. It feels like nature is pulling in on itself, stripping down to the elemental and getting rid of anything unnecessary before the snows come.

Something in me wants to follow suit. I’ve brought in most of the deck chairs, emptied the rain barrel, stained the decks, put plastic sheets on the windows, brought in firewood from the garage and filled in the holes made by the woodpecker in the outside cabin walls (while the hairy woodpecker watched my futile efforts from a nearby aspen tree).

These days before winter descends, there’s something in the air, not just the sense of clarity and purpose, but an expectation, like waiting for the other shoe to drop. I take a deep breath.