The Longest Blog Ever-- In Which I Wrap Things Up...

So I've officially left my home away from home away from home (that's twice removed... from past and future, D.C. and Santa Fe). It was teary-eyed in the end, though my final hours felt like they were spent warming up and then revving my engine-- to keep pace once I hit the outside world again. Sure enough, once I got on Interstate 5, I was back to feeling aggravated, impatient, with an urge to speed, an urge to get ahead. Only this time it felt tempered, ever-so-slightly, by some inner-space of mindfulness.

My last day on retreat: into the dining hall after practicing, women from retreat surrounding me with questions, while I just want to retreat into my meal. I have come to greatly enjoy eating in silence, learning to savor the food by not clouding it with mindless chatter. The silence silenced, they are finally able to talk. I'm not sure what to say. Normally in such situations, I turn to ask questions. Yet, everything I normally begin a conversation with now seems contrived, formulaic, more of a distraction than a means of connecting. Maybe I just long for stillness, for silence. Once the questions begin, I find myself repeating myself to several women. One older woman, is sitting across from me at the lunchtable, but I've already given her my spiel:

"Yes, I am the yogi who builds trails here." A hearty round of thank-you's-- the appreciations flow like in-breath, and my gratitude, like out-breath, returns to them. By the third woman, I have a rehearsed response I didn't even consciously create. It's terse, designed to silence itself. "I am trail-building yogi. From DC. Moving to Santa Fe to study Eastern Philosophy. This was a waystation for me to build a practice. Thank you for letting me serve."

The night before, during an intimate sharing session, where yogis were instructed to turn to their neighbor and share their Truth, and their Process, I was overcome with the urge to flee the meditation hall. Yes, I will just get up and go. I haven't practiced nearly as much as these yogis, owing to the fact that I am a worker here half the day. I don't have anything to say. I really, really don't want to sit and bullshit some stranger to fill five minutes. I hope there are an even number of yogis to pair up without me. But the woman beside me turns too fast for me to move. She expects me to share with her. She is small, and ever-so-slightly frail, at middle-age. Framing her face is a graying auburn curtain of hair that curls under her chin the way her back and neck, slightly scoliotic, bends toward the floor. Cynthia lights up, telling me how wonderful it has been seeing me around the retreat grounds-- I remind her of her son, with my height, my facial hair, and the way my mouth moves and smirks. I am suddenly at ease-- Cynthia is motherly and genuine. I now see that he has been sitting beside me for some time, waiting to share this warmth with me. In that moment, the thought passes through me, "Why was I so scared-- to be vulnerable?" -- the question containing the answer within it. Cynthia becomes very vulnerable to me, telling me how her newfound career of caregiving has been waning, how her husband is much older, and unable to go on retreats any longer. She informs me how, being alone in the woods on the trails that I built, she feels years lighter--finally feeling totally safe to roam in nature. Cynthia used to spend countless hours in the woods of Rhode Island as a child. For years since, she has developed a fear of going out alone into them. I realize that I heart Cynthia for her openness, especially as she self-consciously backtracks, projecting that I must not care to know so much about her life-story. No, no, no Cynthia-- I want to say-- this is all I care about, in fact. Cynthia's vulnerability encourages me to open up to her... as the words I thought would be bullshit pour out, I realize they are becoming organized around the Dharma, my experience on retreat was being framed by everything we were taught, and this, coupled with intuitions about myself I brought into practice, became a cohesive sense of the process at work in me. I was "owning" my Truth. The ways in which I spin my wheels out on the asphalt of life's day-to-dayness, on the muddy spots that I want to just grind my way out of... Cynthia cares to hear all this, I think, though I too, self-consciously downgrade my reflections as unworthy of the meditation hall. At the end of our sharing session, we are both overflowing the allotted time. We cement our bond to the Dharma by taking the Three Refuges, all the yogis bestowing on one another a red Refuges bracelet. Taking a foot or so of red string, we ceremonially tie three knots, one at a time; each symbolizing the refuges of Dharma (the way), Buddha (the enlightened one), and Sangha (the community of practitioners). I struggle with the fine motor-coordination of tying a tiny piece of string (since I've spent weeks dragging out thick roots and vines, and yanking ferns right out of the ground, my fingers are not nimble enough). I give her a slip-knot followed by a shoelace tie, throw a couple more knots in for good measure. We are supposed to wear the bracelets until they fall off, reminding us of taking Refuge, and, I think, of the impermanence of all things-- even our deepest spiritual aspirations.

The next morning, there is another round of talks and sharing circles to transition us out of retreat. I really want to share, and compare pathbreaking in the woods to the work the yogis have been doing in the mind, clearing a trail that accord with the Dharma, but there are forty yogis, and only an hour to share, so I wait for a space to emerge for me to fill... They conduct the sharing circle Quaker style (speak when the spirit moves you), and many many folks are very very moved to speak. One lady, who I noted early in the retreat as having a rather sour look on her face (which I learned to take less personally and more compassionately, as a result of a great deal of inner-strife), opened up with a great depth of feeling. She turned from the circle to me and said, "And you, you with the red blanket, is it Stephen? The day I spilled the soup and you came over and helped me-- I could feel it, I could feel the compassion. Thank you. Thank you so much." And I instinctively chuckled at first, at "spilled the soup" because it had been such an odd, seemingly trivial experience. But she begins to tear up as she says these words to me... I am stopped with a feeling of chills in my chest, into my spine. Evidently such a simple act had touched her quite deeply. In the moment, several days earlier, I had arrived late to dinner. There was something disorienting in the air, and I heard a thud of a bowl and clatter of utensils, as the woman behind me spilled her soup all over the serving table. I just grabbed a handful of napkins beside me and gave them to her, noticing that she was trying to push it all back into her bowl by hand, probably very embarrassed, because on a retreat where you are supposed to be very still and mindful, it is, on some tragic, paradoxically non-accepting level, doubly shaming to make the mistake of being clumsy. I scooped up some lentils and veggies into a napkin, handed her the rest, and left it at that. This simple, tiny gesture, amid a sea of inaction by all the other yogis, so caught up in their focused states of awareness, touched her so very deeply... and I had absolutely no idea until she singled me out! Goes to show how such little moments of thoughtfulness can affect others, and I reflect on moments when others have shown the same compassionate consideration for me. So very heartening. This brings me to a strange contradiction of retreats-- that while practicing so intently, with the ultimate aim of understanding the Three Marks of Existence: impermanence of all phenomena, unsatisfactoriness of experience, and no-self, we seem to lose sight of the implications of the no-self-- and the attendent openness and compassion it should entail.

Maybe I should rephrase, into less heady language. Retreats practiced very intently seem to push yogis into these intensely self-involved states, often becoming competitive (with self or others). By the end of it, I suppose we're all more opened up to considering others, but during the retreat I note a great deal of self-centeredness (but also I great deal more of compassion, I should state). All of this self-involvedness seems forgivable because of the ultimate aims of Buddhism. In practice, it seems paradoxical-- to go further inward to find a greater outward orientation. And in moments like at dinner, when on another night I would have been too self-involved to break my from my intention or concentration, probably foisting the responsibility on her with a thought like "she's perfectly capable of cleaning that up herself", at such moments I think I see point of practice-- to understand the spiritual reality underlying the outward, material appearance of the act-- both her dropping the soup was a manifestation of an inner-tension that was either trying too hard to focus or becoming distraught with herself for not mantaining proper focus. Suffering distraction or the pressure of being rushed, she spilled the soup, revealing her inner-state (which most yogis are careful about concealing beneath a placid gaze). Once revealed, manifested as an accident, it is up to us to treat with compassion that spiritual hindrance she is suffering. One simple act of giving, and the whole energy of the moment is turned on its head. Her silent suffering, alone on an island, is suddenly jolted back into the wider world of loving-compassion. My act said to her, I value you by paying you attention, not withholding it for myself alone.

I don't mean to engage in too much self-congratulatory back-patting. It was a tiny gesture resulting from a bit of awareness and compassion-- no grand act. But those little acts build momentum, and like ripples in a pond, extend to shore and ripple back toward us. To me, it speaks volumes about how I wish to inhabit this world... and the world I wish to inhabit.



Earlier I wrote about being mindful on the road, which got me thinking. Mind-fullness-- what does that even mean? When the purpose of meditation seems to be mind-emptyness. Emptying of thoughts, emptying of distractions-- just pure awareness, wedded to each moment. (Following that metaphor, the way meditation actually proceeds seems to involve getting divorced by the end of every moment, eloping with some thought or feeling that demands attention. And, with any divorce, the suffering of judgment-- I shouldn't have left, why didn't she stay. And then the generalizing-- why can't I make anything work out; I'm hopeless. But this "failure" to properly meditate (which I defy anyone to come up with what that exactly entails-- even Nirvana is impossible to quantify or articulate. How can one use words and concepts to describe that which is empty of all content?) Finally, we begun to intuit that our failure to stay in the moment has nothing whatever to do with "us"-- it's just in the nature of mind, itself, to leave and pause and scan and fret and plan and ache and suffer the dissatisfaction of clinging and avoiding.
What I eventually began to understand, at first intellectually, was that the only thing we aim at in meditation is awareness, and that the only thing that differentiates different schools of thought on meditation is the object of awareness. For some it is the breath. Others it is a mantra. For Vipassana, the object is awareness itself. We pay attention to what is doing the looking, rather than what is being looked at. When we do this, we build a sense of an awareness being the thoughts and feelings which comprise the "I" It is prior to all sense of an independent ego. How did we function before we were named, at birth? As infants and children, when we didn't yet understand where our body ended and the world began? We existed in a state of limited awareness, simply absorbing sensory input and reacting instinctively.
The difference as we age becomes that overlaid over all of our awareness is a set of assumptions about ourselves and the world. This stands in as a filter to experience. The old instincts are there, for survival, and atop them are instincts with a larger focus-- that include yet transcend the old instincts. They are the sexual instinct and the power instinct. (These correspond to the first three chakras: survival, sexuality, and power. The fourth chakra, the heart, is where we begin to open back up to the world by expanding our ego-boundaries to include the "them" or the "other" Thus where the third chakra sees difference and competition, the fourth chakra sees similarity and cooperation. Where the first and second chakra sees others as objects for self-satiation, the fourth reconsiders those objects as containing an innate subjectivity, manifested as awareness, and thus comes to value their needs as equivalent to one's own.

Running out of caffeinated steam, at a Seattle coffeehaus next to the famous Pike Place Market, smell of freshly gutted fish wafting alongside roasted coffee, which alongside the many sheerly clothed women, revealing backs more than cleavage on this day, to the point of causing wonder in me whether back is the new front-- all this makes the tangy-burnt amber in the air quite confoundingly amorous... (Ok I just made the bit about the smells up but I needed something romantic...) Going to the massive towering steel and glass Central Public Library now. To read a bit. To yearn a bit. Hopefully on to Vancouver tonight, if Matt makes his flight, after having missed two, due to various complications... Bless you all! I think of and miss you daily...