#17. The Big Bear Speaketh.

Early notes on a later-in-life retreat

Last night I returned from a 5-day silent retreat at the Big Bear Retreat Center, led by two Bay Area Buddhist nuns consisting of six days of meditation sessions, dharma talks, ‘yogi jobs’, the renunciation of phones and laptops, moving/walking meditation, and through it all, Noble Silence in which there was to be no speaking except if truly necessary. I’d not done anything like this before, despite having meditated on-and-off for decades to varying degrees of seriousness (my current practice for the past three years has been 33 minutes a day, and I’ve averaged probably 359 days a year constancy.) We sat on a cushion or chair for about five hours a day, some in meditation some in listening or chanting, and about 90 minutes of moving meditation, in which I usually walked through the Ponderosa pines, wild sage and lavender, wild California roses, maple trees, and SoCal fauna. In pleasurable contrast to the atmosphere in San Francisco, Big Bear is 6800 feet closer to heaven with its big blue skies and arid 82F days adorned by afternoon breezes you could hear coursing through the pine needles fifty feet above. It’s the kind of climate that makes me want to run around naked like Walt Whitman (more about that later) and hum in harmony with nature.

There’s a lot to report here, and it will likely be doled out over several installments. A lot of it breaks down to two streams, though, those being: while on retreat I felt alternately permeable and impermeable, divine, and at one with the world. What I heard, felt, thought, and did (i.e. meditate a lot) were all aligned with how I try to already live my life, according to hand-picked notions of an ethic that leads toward what I’ll call ‘living right’ (acknowledging that I am not really different from most people except maybe in the possession of an extra dose of discipline). And then in fewer than five minutes after leaving the Center I fell into an existential and moral crevass that did not relent for the almost eight hour drive home and into this morning where upon waking I was still beset with this existential cloud over my head. In minutes I went from loving the week to being upset at myself for having done it, and feeling the growing discomfort of a growing vulnerability which took me by surprise.

It is early evening as I write this and I hope to hang on to the feeling as fully as I can to get it to the page before it evaporates into the running narrative of my life thus far. Over the years I have tended to write about things in an anecdotal or conceptual form but this requires translating raw feeling into an experience I think worth sharing, and so I may write this is shorter sections to cover the map as well as the territory.

a few observations:

-no social media for a week gave me back an embarrassing amount of time which i hope to adhere to and give less of my precious attention to a screen

-one’s western religion and eastern practice can co-exist and there’s no need to throw out jesus to make room for buddha. they actually share clothes when we’re not looking

-many daily things we deem important aren’t. whatever i ‘missed’ in an email or text will still be there when i plug back in and i’ll be better equipped to deal with it

-we are addicted to data at the price of actual knowledge. not knowing and floundering in the dark is a gift. we needn’t know all the stuff about all the stuff, and the level of distraction and information in the modern world is staggering, and i venture to say, makes us a little more stupid

-people are really hungry—starving—for connection in our increasingly human-digitized world. a little ‘talk time’ would have been valued.

-because everything is impermanent, it is wise to subscribe to the long view. it will help with anxiety, pain, frustration and anger from unrealistic expectations, and all myriad conditions.

-compassion is where both depth and growth come from. step inside someone else’s shoes, and find your own.

Which brings us to the next Koan…

Koan #17

Normally in one of the Buddhist retreats I just attended the participants are asked to adhere as a basic minimum to the Five Precepts, which are: don’t kill, steal, be a sex fiend, lie, drink or do drugs. There is the option to do the Sixth, which is Appropriate Eating, asking adherents not to eat between roughly noon and breakfast the next day. As a high school and college wrestler, not eating is not a big deal really, so I opted in. And just by chance the koan I picked from the pile today is

Skip lunch.

What that means to you is up to you. What you experience from it is up to you. A lot of people in the world aren’t afforded the choice. Maybe do it to better understand their situation, so you know them a little better when you see them on the street. Maybe you send that money to a food bank, the Red Cross, or other food-based humanitarian effort. Maybe you save it for your children. Whatever it is you choose to do with the money you leave in your pocket is incidental to the main activity, though. Just try it and be mindful of it.