From Silence into Sound

Time to return home from silent retreat.   I place all my good intentions inside an invisible blue Tiffany box and bring this little package home with me (where, in fact, some of these intentions are implemented) .  Insight is instructive.  But action is intrinsic to change.

I wish I could conclude with a story of major transformation.  Here’s the best I can do:  On the plane ride home, I sit next to a professional calligrapher.  She gives me a name tag, and asks that I write my first and last names.  My Roman Script is neat and uninspired.  Then she rewrites  my name in an elaborate Sanskrit script.  One moment I am  somebody ordinary and familiar.   Then, using identical components, with a different slant, my identify slips into the silent spaces between exotic letters.

Everything changes.

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Perfect moments….delivered unwrapped

We live in a universe that operates on subtleties, and yet speech is the least subtle medium of communication.  How to exactly articulate our vast imaginings, our dreams and primal emotions, our tenderness and our truths, to birth our inner worlds through the constrictive channel of the larynx?  to color our breath with words that reflect our consciousness without clumsiness or distortion?  To do all this with control and attention, choosing what we withhold and what we share?

This week, while suppressing sound, I examined my habitual speech patterns.  When our teacher tells of boarding a plane after silent retreat, and overhearing a passenger lambasting her husband, I cringe in horror.  I’m a frequent flyer on this route of frankness without filters, a polluted purging of my own inner dis-ease, breaking the sound barrier with explosive, impatient force.  Now, with my automatic impulse to routinely express exasperation, anger, and irritability thwarted, in the pause I learn to greet my reality with composure, so as not to contaminate the container of my own being.  In this voiceless state, I’m yielding, unable to exert control through vocal venting.

But there’s also frustration, resistance and invective spring-loaded into the syllables, and few are enlivened by appreciation.   Leaf-blower lexicon, pushing the path in reverse direction, instead of treading lightly along it.  Some frustration also arises from scuzzy self-expression – when my listener can’t intuitively connect the dots, my inner saboteur impetuously splashes red paint all over the canvas.

My expectation is that each moment be perfect, presented to me in ‘that little blue Tiffany box’ (as one student says).  And it is.  And I don’t usually see it, because my perception is so obscured by the white noise of fault finding.

Today, please share your one perfect silent moment with me.

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Beyond whispers, Beneath words

My roommate knows me by the found natural objects I bring back to the cabin – peeled aspen bark, colored stones, my exquisite manzanita walking stick – and also by my sheer negligee, cocomango body lotion, the slab of dark chocolate on the nightstand.   I know her by the precision with which she folds her clothes, the slim silhouette of her naked body, her particular brand of silence.  We speak the language of doors, lamps, footsteps (open, closed, on, off, loud, soft).  Our movements are choreographed so that, mirage-like, we can occupy the same space without collision.

Perfectly synchronized, totally compatible, we understand each other wider, deeper, harder, than anyone else we’ve ever known .  She arrived after silence began; of all those present, we alone haven’t spoken to each other.

When we break silence, my first words are addressed to her.  I meet her eyes across the circle, bring my hands to heart chakra, greet her from beyond speech,  “Namaste, Sharon”.  She blows me kisses, handfuls of kisses, her wide open arms an affirmation of an exchange more profound than language, her bowed posture an eloquent expression of sensibility.

It is a welcome unlike any other, an acknowledgment of intense shared intimacy and clear unvoiced conversations.

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Lessons written in Flame

There is ash drifting down from the sky, charred flakes falling.  Back at the ranch, we hold a fire-diverting ceremony.  Is our collective intention sufficiently powerful to transform a force of nature?  We use mind waves, not water, an element irrefutably proven to extinguish fires.  I keep rearranging my face so that the word ‘sceptic’ isn’t emblazoned on my features.

But the ranch manager presents fire as a respected friend, an agent of growth.  “We want the fire to burn away the excess, the extra, and encourage the essential to emerge”, he says. (After this statement, the letter E collapses in exhaustion and must be resuscitated before proceeding.)   “We want it to devour what’s unnecessary, spare what is healthy and whole”

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Stopped by the Cops

Has anything fundamental shifted since I arrived on silent retreat?   I’ve traversed some roadblocks, and not only metaphorically.  On my sunrise hike today, I ignore the ‘Road Closed’ sign on Sunflower Drive, since I don’t need permission to follow my chosen route.  It’s an uphill hike, and way down in the valley I can see an itsy-bitsy police car restricting traffic because of a brush fire inland.  And those itsy-bitsy police have spied me (see that tiny moving speck on the mountainside, pardner? Is that a sunflower swaying in the wind or a woman walking?).

It takes them six minutes on winding roads to cruise up slooowly alongside me.  I walk forward a few more paces just to tease, laughing inside.  How do I communicate, “I’m an escapee from silent retreat, having an existential crisis, and have just discovered I’m a sunflower?”  There are two incredibly cute men in uniform inside the car.  “What’s your purpose, ma’am?”   Excellent question.

I put my fingers to my lips, smile idiotically, bring my hands together, namaste, feign slitting my throat with my index finger, attempt to convey sanity while acting deranged.  Officer One turns down the radio, Officer Two takes off his sunglasses (all the better to hear me with).   Nice eyes.  They wait, while I consider my options.  Do I want to be handcuffed? Well, yes.  Do I want one (or both) of these men to take me home with them?  Well, yes.   Some things always stay the same.

“I haven’t spoken in days, “I croak, as if that explains everything.  “This road goes 100 miles to LA. Is that where you’re heading?” asks the one with the strong jawline.  A dimple too, because he’s smiling.  “Only if you are”, I  say.

Unexplored territory for the next retreat.

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The Sunflower Speaks

When I was three, my mother sewed me a glorious costume of yellow chiffon petals, topped with a black beret.  Images of sunflowers emerge everywhere on the ranch – the organic garden, stained glass panels, in the fires illuminating the western sky at night, on the sundial.  Open, resplendent, passionate, bold, spectacularly joyful.

I always believed I was a violet, but maybe I transcend all my conditioned thoughts about myself – maybe I’m a full-blown bouquet studded with sunflowers.

The sunflower sports a big, seed-engorged bull’s eye – an explicit target for intention, an unambiguous core of potential.  Solid resolution at center, encompassed by a soft golden halo.  This symbol reminds me that I’m too often diverted from purpose, susceptible to suggestion, tentative, lacking a focused objective.  How to live before I die?, I inquire.

It’s like listening for a signal from a far-off star.

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Sacred is Easy when you’re not Scared

Like a Russian stacking doll, a matryoshka, today I’m on my own private silent retreat within the official silent retreat. And within my personal retreat is this spiritual refuge, although I can no longer distinguish whether it’s inside me, or I’m inside it.  Even my irascible self relaxes into quietude.

For a moment.  Yeah, yeah, sacred is easy when you’re not scared, when you’re protected inside an artificial capsule, when your astronomical cell phone bill isn’t overdue, your pet iguana isn’t slobbering spittle, your blaring tv isn’t flashing coverage of those dying in Darfur, when you don’t have to live compatibly with just one other person.  Then into which tiny crevice do you insert your mind stimulating capsule of peace?

Returning to the ranch, I hear the plaintive call of goats, the terrible wail that human adults would make if allowed to beseech their own mothers in moments of distress, a desperate, full-bodied bleating.  “It’s ok” I whisper to them, “go graze in the valley’.

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Where Angels Tread

There’s a Sufi exercise where you walk behind your practice partner, imitating their gait so as to fully experience their state of mind – the soul is in the stroll, so to speak.  Today, there seems no distinction between my body and the trees, the rocks, even the lizards – it’s the closest I’ve ever come to a feeling of no separation.   I would be invisible to my practice partner, and even if discernible amidst my environs, my walk would be a motionless glide.  The only being who could imitate me right now would be an angel.

Angels travel upward, but I’ve already climbed every peak within walking distance.  I follow a track downhill, through thicket, past Painted Cave, off the map.  No vistas, no visions, no visitors here.  As I turn a corner in the bottom of the valley, I am delivered into a secret expanse, an oval of grasses and wildflowers.  One solitary sun-bleached wooden bench.  I know this hidden place instantly, and it’s not outside at all.   I have the shocked sensation of my psychic landscape being turned inside out, translated by topography.   Amanpuri, place of peace.  I take my seat.

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Swallowing the Walking Stick

Several  psycho-souls (yes, I’m still reacting in habitual critical mode) actually choose to meditate in the breaks between meditations.  I would rather encounter mountain lion in the natural wilderness than further investigate the hinterland of my own mind.

And there’s a kind of hypnotic serenity to hiking now, almost as though I am static and creation is just flowing around and through me, like being on a moving walkway in a nature documentary.  I am surprised by my own confidence – I’m walking alone at dawn, at noon, and at dusk in a National Forest (armed with a hell of a big walking stick), but feeling self-reliant and secure. I’m totally assured that my being is equipped with resources to contend with whatever materializes – it’s as though I’ve swallowed the walking stick.

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Live by Example

Pillows, cushions, bolsters, blankets, blocks – at each session I construct an original artistic ensemble for my supreme sitting comfort.  I mentally exhaust all the synonyms for ‘excruciating’.  Everybody else is seated with poise, unmoving, spines straight with the requisite gentle curve, totally committed in their posture.  Their intention supports my practice, and I remain still only because of this collective power.  And our teacher tells us this  secret –“You are not alone, “ her supremely reassuring lullaby croons.  We are never alone in our feelings or thoughts, we can be sure that the experience of some reflects our own.    Since the persistence of others depends on my example, as mine does on theirs, I try for the neutral face, if not for the insanely ambitious gentle smile.

But tomorrow, everything will change. Tomorrow, I’ll stop worrying about how it looks, and build a boat for my body to float on.  I’ll anchor myself to my breath.  I’ll appear eccentric, but feel divine.  Physical sensations subside, and I can start observing and labeling thoughts without insistent prompts from the vocabulary of pain.  There is some wisdom to manipulating external conditions, instead of merely accepting with equanimity.

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