Thoughts on nature

After lunch on the third day of my fourth silent retreat, at Spirit Rock, in the San Geronimo Valley of Western Marin in Northern California, I sat in a plastic chair with my face to the sun. I had just completed my work meditation, cleaning the floors of the dining hall, with my three teammates. The only words we had ever said to each other were our names when we were being trained by one of the groundskeepers right after we arrived. Over the past few days we had silently figured out a plan, and developed our own nonverbal language.

Once only a few people were left at tables, I would go downstairs to the laundry room and get the dry mop and prop it by the back door. That was the indication that we should start putting the chairs up on the tables, though on the first day we did this before the table wiping team had a chance to come through, and they waved their spray bottles and their rags furiously and shook their heads and we didn’t make that mistake again. First, I would dry mop all the little scraps into small piles and then the young woman with unruly hair and wide eyes would use a regular broom to sweep it up into the dust pan. We did this in sections and as soon as we completed one, our two other teammates, a man who’s tattoos of Buddhist symbols seemed at odds with his jockish look, and a tall sandy colored man who used a cane, would come through spraying the ground with a squirt bottle before mopping it clean. Afterwards, we found each others eyes, even though eye contact was not expected or needed or wanted most of the time there, and we would nod and bow - good job, we did it, thank you.

Every day I was increasingly astonished by how little actually needed to be said.

Each afternoon in the San Geronimo Valley was so bright and dry and hot, one of the many things I had not prepared for upon packing. But after my work meditation and before the afternoon meditation began, I filled up a red pebbled plastic cup with pellet ice from the dispenser and sat on that plastic chair and took off my Dansko robins egg blue patent leather clogs, and pulled my long dress up to my thighs and let the sun warm me, and drank my cold water and munched on ice and felt happy.

On the third day, a guy from my meditation group with scraggly facial hair who had worn a shirt with an abolitionist saying on it the first day came and pulled up a chair near me. This rankled, and I noticed it. I had to remind myself - we’re all silent here. He isn’t going to make small talk about the weather or the food or what happened this morning in group. What could he even say? “That meditation felt long, huh?” He’s allowed to be here, I thought. Just like me. But when I glanced up at him he, without looking directly at me, pointed to an egret, or a crane, or a stork, one of those impossible creatures with the neck like a delicate stem, who was now walking in their exaggerated way towards me, just a few feet away.

There were all sorts of creatures on this sacred land, this land I had heard about for years from my teachers, seen all over social media, studied online. This land that was, in late August in the middle of a drought, crunchy and golden, dusty and sunbaked. This land that I was there to appreciate on a week long retreat specifically about nature, led by some of the most renowned “eco dharma” teachers in the country. I had not chosen this retreat for the nature component, I just chose a week that coincided with the time my children’s father would be taking them to see his family in England. It didn’t matter what the content was or who the teachers would be. It didn’t matter that I had told myself stories about how I wasn’t an outdoorsy person and never really had a deep yearning for more connection with land. Just get me to Spirit Rock.

Creatures like a jackrabbit - or was it a jackal? - that had darted, leapt, bounded across my path the night before as I made my way back to my dorm after our final meditation at 9pm, its ears cartoonishly bobbing, like something out of a children’s book. Creatures like the baby coyote we were told via flyers posted on the announcement board to stay away from - that though he was cute and looked like a little puppy, we didn’t want him to think humans were friendly. Creatures like the rattlesnakes and the eagles and the wild turkeys and the hundreds and hundreds of lizards that would appear in any line of sight if you just stayed still long enough to see.

I looked at the egret/crane/stork who was now walking right beside me, sunbathing on that plastic chair. Those claw feet like something out of a nightmare, a beak that looked designed to kill, bookending a body so graceful and feminine. It moved like we did on our walking meditations - one foot up at a time, deliberate, moving as slow as you can without losing your balance. That morning one of our teachers had said something I could tell we all found revolutionary - I’m not sure how I could tell, but I could: instead of putting our focus on the foot on the ground, bring awareness to the resting foot, the one not bearing weight, the one in motion.

With the abolitionist shirt guy now seated on a chair a few body lengths away, facing in the opposite direction, and the egret just inches to my left, a lizard jolted out of whatever invisibility cloak it was wearing directly in front of me and stopped as if tranquilized. I watched the lizard, still, and the crane, approaching. And then, surprising me more than anyone in this scenario, the crane captured the lizard in its mouth with one confident swoop and flew away, staying low to the ground.

Cranes eat lizards?

I looked over at abolitionist shirt, gawping breathlessly. Did you see that!? I wanted to say. But his eyes were cast away, fixated on nothing, closed for connection, as mine had been when he came over.

If I had had a journal I would have opened it and started writing furiously, but on this retreat, they asked that we refrain from journaling just as we do from reading or consuming media or talking. In the days leading up to the retreat I worried, and told people I was worried. People on Zoom calls - “it’ll be my first retreat not even able to write, wish me luck!” - my friends on audio messages, the man I’m seeing. How much had I been leaning on this comfort, this armor; how the experience of journaling about my feelings was actually maybe keeping me safely at arms distance from them.

We moved from meditation to meditation on different parts of the land with the same group of 20 people. We were outside in our group for 12 hours a day, starting at 6am when the sun hadn’t risen and the fog was low and I would start our wearing a kooky combination of workout leggings and socks and a flowy dress with a sweater on top to stay warm, while everyone else showed up in sensible layers (where do people buy such things?), fleeces, wool hats, hiking shoes. Again, I’m no outdoorsy person.

As the lead teacher explained during one of the daily dharma talks, meditating outside is different than inside. Inside, things can be wrong. It’s too hot in here - someone needs to turn the AC on. Outside, when the clouds part and the sun starts baking your face, what are you going to do? It’s the sun, doing what the sun does. Inside, you get your pillows and your mats and your blankets just the way you want for maximum comfort so you can last and last. Outside, sometimes a minute or two in you realize you’re on an incline, your body listing sideways, or there’s a rock underneath your ankle. What’s it like to list sideways, to have a rock underneath your ankle? Inside, someone clearing their throat is a distraction. Outside, yellow jackets buzz around your face and you can swat them away, or not. But things just are how they are outside, and something about that was an immense relief.

The effort it takes to make things comfortable, or at least to remove discomfort, can take up the majority of a life. The effort to change our natures, to stop bad things from happening, to wrest the steering wheel from the bad man who’s hijacked the car. What’s it like to just be with ourselves and even the world as it is - uncomfortable, hot, potentially dangerous?

Midway through the retreat we had the opportunity to meet in a small group with a teacher and two other participants. Names were called throughout the day, and the uncertainty of which teacher or participants you’d be paired with is just another in an endless life of things you have no control over. My name was eventually called with two others and we all stood - a tall, handsome guy wearing a trucker hat and a woman slightly older than me who I had struggled over the past few days to condense into an identity - was she stern or just locked into her practice? We silently made our way to a circular wooden platform overlooking the hills, along with our teacher. I had been near this group of people for days, breathing together, hearing every same noise and rustle, every little cough and shuffle. Without saying anything or even making direct eye contact I had become intimately acquainted with their energies and their forms, their idiosyncrasies (the by-the-book front row student who always lays down on her right side for the first part of the day, the long haired college aged looking kid who walks barefoot through the brush), their noises and habits.

We sat in a little circle and our teacher asked if anyone had a question about their practice or anything they wanted to share. She had said at the beginning of our meditation that morning that at this point in the retreat journey you might start comparing this experience with previous ones, yearning for the breakthroughs or the deepening you might have experienced before.

The handsome guy spoke first, introducing himself. I hadn’t noticed before, since I had never looked directly at him, that his eyes were very blue. He said this was his fourth one of these nature retreats and he doesn’t really have so much of a practice at home, but on this retreat he was finding there were a couple of different modes he was falling into, and one was of constant rumination about things he had done in his past that he felt guilt over. We listened. I was so eager to connect, to validate and relate and show him as much as I could in those seconds that he wasn’t alone, that we all did that, and those thoughts were just that, thoughts, that could be let go of anytime. I tried not to overdo the active listening cues and just let it be said, let it rest there, let it be held.

The woman spoke next and she said that she had been on many retreats over the years but this one was particularly hard for her, because she had recently experienced two wrenching losses. As she spoke, tears leaked from her eyes. She said the nature of one of the losses was so violent that she sometimes found being outside to be too much - the sun in particular seemed garish and intrusive - and she had to escape into the quiet, cool, consistency of the meditation hall. She said at times she felt like she should protect the perfect beauty of the natural world from the violence of this pain. We leaned in so close to her, and I actively resisted putting my hand on her arm. The compassion for each other existed without us having to prove it.

I shared, a face already soaked with tears, that I couldn’t relate to the experience of yearning for past retreats. The first one I went on I was still mired in delusion about my marriage and what I wanted and needed and desired in order to be, what? Happy? Free? Or, just me? By the second one, the marriage had ended and we were preparing to tell our sons. On my third retreat, I was beginning to thaw, but there was an inner turbulence and restlessness there that mirrored what I was feeling in my life, manifested mostly in highly enmeshed short lived romantic encounters.

I said in each of those times, I was working hard to protect myself from what I knew. But this time feels different.

We all sat for a minute, with tears in our eyes. Then blue eyes said eagerly, “Have you seen the coyote yet?!”

None of the rest of us had, but he was very excited to tell us how cute he was and how much he did in fact look like a little puppy.

Before we left the sacred safety of that container we had built together in 20 minutes to rejoin the larger one, we bowed deeply to each other, and I said “I value the silence so much… but this too…” I couldn’t finish because of the tears, but I didn’t need to. We all nodded and closed our eyes and took a deep breath, and then made our way back to the group.

That night I finished dinner early and decided to do the longest of the trails on the property before the dharma talk at 7pm - the three mile Great Loop trail, which the map indicated was moderately to severely steep at points. I figured I can walk a 15 minute mile and do it in an hour. I decided against bringing a big bottle of water and hadn’t seen my phone since the renunciation ceremony on the first night, so I set out in my garishly gold Tory Burch sneakers (not traditionally worn for hikes, but more practical I thought than the clogs), yoga pants, a sweatshirt, and the standard issue Casio analog watch they offer you since most of us rely on phones for timekeeping, and nothing in hand but the trail map.

I started powering up a steep path, past the solar panels and the Buddha statue adorned with offerings like a 90 day sobriety chip and a nearly intact snakeskin, to a hill overlooking the meditation hall. I began to realize (pinning for future processing how this trend tracks within my “real life”) that maybe I’ve taken on a bit much for an after dinner walk. The path was steep indeed, and if my measuring unit of the distance between two knuckles is correct, by the time I reach the summit of the big hill in front of me I will only be about one fifth done with the trail. Conscious of time and the short window I’ve given myself both before the dharma talk and before the sun sets under the hills, making my solo phoneless journey into the brush a little more dangerous, I started to get nervous.

That flyer said bobcats and mountain lions were very rare, right? And if we see them just make a lot of noise and keep walking? Or back away slowly, I couldn’t remember… maybe that was a bear?

The only way out is through, the only way out is through. Getting up the hill is the hardest part. Head down, forging ahead as quickly as possible but still trying to be present. Wise effort, wise effort. The second you get lost in thought you’ll twist an ankle. Just like a walking meditation, just faster. The resting foot, remember? Bring your attention to the resting foot.

I climbed and climbed for much longer than I expected and then I was at the summit, breathless, cold cheeked, looking out over the sacred land I had journeyed for so long to get to. Spirit Rock, this retreat, this hill, this moment in my life. The clouds like a blanket tucking San Geronimo in for the night, the sun low and soft over the glowing golden ridges and valleys.

And there below me, on the crest of the lower hill I had just climbed over, in the calf high brush, was what looked like a fuzzy eared little puppy trotting along at a jubilant clip. I gasped, hands springing to my heart - it’s you!

He must have sensed me above him, because he stopped his jog and turned to look right up at me, his curious face tilted. And then as I panted with exertion and joy, wishing I could stop time and capture it on film or paper or something that could last, something I could take with me, already thinking about how I would tell this story, he turned around and kept trotting away into the evening’s gloaming.

On the last day, we are invited to break our silence and share any final thoughts with our meditation group. The first person who spoke said he tried to meditate alone that afternoon when we were given unstructured solo time, but found himself unable to concentrate without the solidity of this group surrounding him. He said he came for the nature and to get away from people, but actually, we held him just as well as the land did. An older woman who had fallen early in the retreat and had to keep her leg wrapped and use a cane, spoke through tears of the unbelievable kindness that everyone in the group had shown her at some time or the other, through opening doors or getting her water bottle refilled or setting up her space for her, all without speaking. Another woman who always had a thick blanket draped around her shoulders said that she suffered from asthma all her life and was mocked as a child for not being able to be outdoors, and that watching us all confidently walk up hills and sit in the sun or the wind or the fog seemed like courage, and that if we could do it so could she, and that we gave her the strength to be brave too.

I wanted to tell the story of how me and the abolitionist were the only people on earth who witnessed the end of that lizard’s life. I wanted to tell the blue eyed guy I saw the coyote. I wanted to talk about the work meditation and how we figured it out without words, just like the natural world does. I wanted to make some connection between impermanence, the struggle of my life, and how that’s all nature is.

When I tried to talk, of course, the tears came again. The world feels so broken, I said. But here it hasn’t.

I honored my commitment to not journal at all while there, but on the back of the trail map before bed one night I did write this:

The jackrabbit and the stork,

The jackal and the crane.

I don’t know which is which

I never learned their names.

I suppose I could google it now and decide for sure. But do I need their names? Do they know mine?

I was there, with them.

All of us, nature.