[UNLOCKED] My First Silent Retreat Was a Real Banger
Or: TBH I'm snowed under with work and school
Hi everyone!
Whewwww I gotta be honest, this and last week, work + writing + school caught up with me. Multiple work deadlines and a big project for school coming due.
While I’m noodling over work and school, I’ve decided to unlock this dispatch from June, since some of you are new here …
… and because my school project is about mystism and social transformation. Specifically, it’s about expanding my notions of what makes a mystic a mystic. And how does one’s mysticism inform / undergird / prompt social resistance and social transformation?
And.
I am undergoing something of a minor (actually not minor at all) shift in myself and my own thinking, ergo project has become Much More than “just” a school project. If you catch my drift. If you’re hip to my jive. If you’re picking up what I’m laying down.
Anyway, since I write a lot already, I decided to do something instead of writing a paper for school. To be sure, writing is both art and craft, but certainly not the only art and craft this Unruly Quaker likes to partake in.
Also because … because sometimes I want to subvert the dominant paradigm of the written word being THE acceptable academic format.
(Like how in my first grad program I did an interpretative dance instead of a paper that one time.)
As a thank you for your patience in bearing with me, here are exclusive sneak previews of my school project so far.
This is to start with. I have bitten off a lot to chew. :)
There will be more to come, thus my **diving back into school work**
For now, thank you for your patience and please (re?)enjoy this unlocked dispatch from June 22, 2023 —
My First Silent Retreat Was a Real Banger
I’m gearing up for my annual week-long silent retreat, and it has me thinking: how did the practice come to mean so much?
I don’t talk about these retreats a lot, but when I do, most folks have two questions:
Is it hard to be quiet for a whole week?
Uh. Why do you do that? What’s the point?
I’m mulling this over as I write, so I’ll start with the second question. I’ll get to the first one another time.
So: WHY.
The first time, I felt a pull. A leading, in Quakerspeak.
I’d been feeling it for years but finally I made a reservation at a retreat center. At the last minute I thought, Why not try being silent?
I was nervous. I am anxious by nature. But after a bumpy first day or two I settled in. And I learned a lot.
By the end of the week, the world was feeling … shifted.
I wasn’t surprised to be in touch with the “Beyond Within,” as Quakers say. That wasn’t a first.
What was new was that the Beyond Within also felt externalized - maybe let’s call it the Beyond Outside. Or just The Beyond.
Hey, that’s funny. The Beyond. That’s what my favorite Georgia O’Keeffe painting is called.
Just looking around my stark little room at the retreat center, I started feeling pretty damn sure there was a lot going on, like really there — existing, knowable, just beyond my peripheral vision. I’m talking holy divine mystical stuff that was REAL. Realer then real.
I was quite certain. But I also wasn’t sure at all.
Because, I mean, how can you be sure of any of this kind of thing?
It starts to get way meta and epistemological.
How do you know that you know what you know?
My uncertainty was compounded by a strong habit of self-doubt. I’d had decades of practice ignoring or denying important experiences. These included spiritual visions in childhood, clinical anxiety, my appetite, and experiences of sexual harassment and rape.
In each of these instances, people I trusted, who were doing the best they could with the information they had, told me that these experiences were not real or legitimate.
I had been conditioned not to trust myself.
So on this retreat, I was sure of what I knew and I also doubted everything about it.
Self-doubt might not sound like that big a deal. But it started tearing me in half.
With nothing to distract me from my experience, it became increasingly painful. Physically and emotionally unsettling. Like ants in your pants, but instead of your pants, they are crawling around your soul.
Desperate, I did the only thing I could think of. I closed my eyes and asked the Universe for a sign - any old sign would do.
Well, actually, not any old sign. If it could please, please be a sign that would leave no doubt. I was already doubting, I didn’t need more of that. Please, just a clear, unmistakable sign that what I was sensing was real.
I opened my eyes and looked around. Nothing. No signs. Butkus.
Well, shit. Thanks a lot.
Disappointed, frustrated, antsy, I laced up my sneakers and went for a walk.
Nothing happened.
Until suddenly something happened.
I’ll explain.
Wait, wait. I need to back up.
July 2002, Nova Scotia: the last day of our honeymoon. Husband and I were walking a rocky coastline, when I saw a heart-shaped rock.
The size of my palm, gritty with ocean salt, it was almost but not quite a perfect heart shape. It was cool in my hand and felt like a special last-day-of-honeymoon gift. I brought it home. It held my hope that our love would be steadfast and solid, but also filled with delightful little surprises along the way.
That rock sits next to our wedding photo. I treasure it.
I never thought about looking for more heart-shaped rocks until I was in Tasmania. Husband, Teen (then a child of five), and I were poking around a stream bed.
Side salad: The streams in Tasmania are ridiculous. Gorgeous. Pristine. They bottle rainwater there — plain rainwater! It’s wild and fresh and clean. Except for the clearcutting of old eucalypt forests. That doesn’t feel so wild or fresh or clean.
Anyway, Husband and Child were seeing how far they could chuck rocks, as one does. Truth be told, I was getting a little bored (shameful, in such a lovely place).
My best cure for boredom is fossicking. Fossicking is an Australian term for “looking around for stuff.”
I often amused myself while Child played at a park by looking for dropped cockatoo, lorikeet, or Kookaburra feathers.
Here in this stream, though, it was all smooth, rounded river stones.
Well wouldn’t you know it, I found a perfectly heart-shaped stone.
It felt like another gift from the Universe, denoting a different part of my life, still with Husband and now with Child.
Steadfast, solid, delightfully surprising.
Heart rocks: special and, please note, fairly rare gifts from the Universe.
Are you picking up what I’m putting down here?
Now back to 2017, the last day of my first retreat.
I walk to the woods. A mellow loop I’ve walked twice daily all week. I’ve asked the Universe for a sign that all this spiritual-awakening stuff I’m feeling is real. Nothing. Sad trombone, womp womp.
Okay, I thought. Maybe I’m being selfish. The Universe doesn’t take requests. I mean obviously. The Divine Beyond is not a DJ.
And then. Bam. Halfway through the walk, ALLLLLLLLLLLLL these heart rocks appear. Just appear in front of my feet as I walk. So many of them. So many.
Okay, right, they did not appear, they did not materialize out of nowhere; they did not drop from the sky. (That would be quite dangerous.)
They appeared to me, as in they literally started shining, almost lifting up and hovering, luminously sparkling.
Y’all. Stay with me. I take your trust seriously. I know you count on me to be a reliable narrator. This happened.
The path lit up with sparkling heart-shaped rocks as if they had lights inside them and as if there was a spotlight on them from outside and as if Yoda were lifting them up a few inches off the ground.
I could see this. Yet at the same time, I could also see all the same heart rocks as they normally looked without me noticing them: half covered with dirt, just rocks on a path in the woods.
It was vision on top of vision. Like a clear overlay, but one just as real as the other.
Well, okay, dang. That’s a pretty good sign. Thanks, Universe.
And I understood immediately: this is how it works.
There is love in abundance. It’s everywhere. You just have to notice it.
I felt happy and grateful, but it strangely did not feel like an ecstatic experience. It felt beautiful but also very real and matter-of-fact.
Notably, my usual sense of “Shit, I need to grasp this tightly or I’ll lose this feeling” was absent. This, I sensed, and dared to trust, was a permanent shift.
And what do you know, I was right. The heart-rock vision, among other changes, has persisted.
The rocks don’t light up or float, but I see heart rocks everywhere, all the time.
It’s almost preposterous how many there are.
Every once in awhile, I put one in my pocket to set on a windowsill or give to someone.
Usually I just sigh happily, hug myself a little, and keep walking.
I marvel at the love and abundance of the Universe.
I thank the Beyond for lifting whatever veil had been covering my eyes.
I try to remember to remember abundance when I’m feeling petty or bitchy or tired. (Doesn’t always work.)
Mostly, though, I smile at the heart rocks, and they smile back, and I feel a big, deep, wide sense of wonder.
And gratitude.
XOXO