Bodies Unbound

CHAPTER 6.

 

THE CABIN RETREAT

 

 

 

May 28, 2008

 

            This morning while still in bed Wyn asked if I was feeling married again.  I said yes.  He asked if I wanted to stay married for another year.  We always decide each May if we are going to continue.  I said, “Okay, sign me up for another year.”  We put on our wedding rings and a half hour later waved good-bye.  I was going off on a ten-day retreat at my cabin with Marco Polo and Dorjé, my two beloved Tibetan Terriers.

            It is always exciting heading towards the cabin.  It is my favorite place on earth.  There are seventeen cabins in the area though you can barely see them from our cabin.  There is a river that runs dramatically over rocks and through the woods, crashing and thundering during the spring, demurely in the late fall, always a part of the singing sounds of the wild.  I have done Qigong by that river, trying to merge with its movements.           

            I inherited the cabin from my mother.  I was Mom’s sole caretaker for several years before she died.  My mother and I had not resolved many of our most painful issues before I moved in with her.  We always said we would never live together, but Life intervened.    The last five days of her life, on Christmas morning, 2000, her heart opened and the block that formed when her mother died when she was four years old, washed away.  For a few days I had the mother I had always wanted.  Then she left.  I would not have missed those few days for the entire world.

             The summer after her death I went to the cabin to be alone and to recuperate.  It was a disaster.  It is very isolated there.  I thought I would turn this vacation into a meditation retreat but in no time I was filled with anxiety. There is no phone reception at the cabin and no heat but a Franklin stove that requires you to fell a tree, saw up the wood and split logs into small pieces.  Mom stayed there all summer long until she was eighty.

How did Mom do it?  I remember letters from her describing every cloud in the sky and the leaves of the cottonwoods turning yellow and falling off the trees and floating down stream like happy little boats.  My mother, whom I never respected, was at heart a contemplative.  Why did I only realize that after her death?

After five days, (I had planned to stay a month), I packed up and went home.  I needed a retreat center with a bell, or a reading room to go to, and a phone nearby to call Wyn with my insights.

 

About 8:00 A.M. I started calling friends from my cell phone to say I would be gone for ten days.  I spoke with my daughter-in-law.  She and my son are separating.  She’s having anxiety attacks.  Tiger, aged seven, is angry, confused, heart broken, and scared for his mother who is beside herself with grief.  Crack goes my heart.  My son is falling apart in his own way. He has lost his cell phone, his wallet, has gotten sick, and sleeps in his office.  The very roots of my hair ache for all of them.

After speaking with my daughter-in-law I took deep breaths while speeding down 99 Highway.  I tried to remember how a metaphysical nurse would think.   She would not see the problem, which is the human condition ruled by a belief that the physical situation is what needs changing.  As a nurse I would look at their true identity – the very image and likeness of God, Spirit.  That thought is like a piano tuners tuning fork.  It holds a strong middle C and allows the out of tune string to come up to its vibration.  I would accept that my son, his wife and my grandson’s true identity could never be touched by their human problems.

 

My family was riddled with unhappy marriages, divorces and multiple marriages, way before it was popular.  My Grandpa George divorced his first wife when he discovered she was trying to kill him for his property.  He then married my grandmother, Della, from a mail order bride service.  They had three children, the middle child being my mother.  Della died at 38 one night while ironing.  My mother, Uncle Ernie and Aunt Grace were farmed out to relatives and orphanages for years until Grandpa re-married.

I had a huge realization the night before I left for the cabin.  I was meditating and I couldn’t stop thinking about men breaking in to my house to hurt me.   I saw their faces through the windows with haunting eyes filled with malice.  Holding the feeling of these fears their reason revealed itself.  When I was eighteen I was working and living in a small town for the summer.  One night a friend was expected and I left the door to my apartment unlocked.  I was awakened to hear the door open, and, thinking it was my friend, I wasn’t worried until I felt a knife in my back and a man telling me not to make a sound.  My going hysterical thwarted his attempted rape.  The neighbors called the police when they heard me screaming.  The police told me that it was my fault for leaving my door open and was fired from my job.  My employers could not have someone working for them who had been involved in a sexual scandal.

After nine hours of driving, shopping, getting gas at $5.49 a gallon for diesel, walking the dogs, and getting coffee – I arrived at the cabin.  It was pouring rain.  It was cold. 

The dogs were overjoyed to be out of the car.  They raced around the woods, barking their heads off, getting soaked, bringing dirt, sand and crud into the cabin.  In and out we all went, me unloading the car, back and forth in the wet, wet rain.

The first thing I did was make a fire.  Alan and Betty, the couple I rent out the cabin to during the winter had left wood by the fireplace so it was dry.  I carefully arranged paper, kindling, pinecones and wood and in no time a fire was blazing and the cabin began to warm up.

It was so still except for the sound of the river, the crackling fire, and the gentle rain.  These ancient sounds are medicine for the soul.  My road weary body was comforted by the simple chores, the familiarity of my surroundings and the beauty.  Beauty is medicine.

In time the rain stopped and the dogs and I walked off our stiffness.  The clouds and mist cut mountain ridges in half and the sun came out occasionally creating vibrant colors.  Everything sparkled and glowed.  The rain brought out the smells of the forest.  I was the only one there.  I felt like the first woman on earth.

This was where Smoky went wild.  This was where I had been coming since I was two years old.  This was my home.  I knew every bend in the river, every tree, every secret path up the glacier rocks in a way only a child can know things.  They were all still there.  Nothing had changed in sixty years; there is the wisdom tree where I had brought countless dilemmas and sat under it until I had an answer, there was the place the fawn who lost its mother came out of the bushes and sat on my lap, there was the cliff over-looking the valley where I have done yoga at dawn for forty years, there was the clearing I had my first kiss.

            I came back to the cabin, made tea and sat by the fire.  I was so grateful for the peace I felt.  There is a picture on the wall of my mother in her seventies.  She has on a stripped t-shirt and a familiar smile.  Sitting there in the cabin I remembered a time I came here to visit her in the 90’s.  I was living in Boulder, CO at the time.

  My son, who was living in L. A., met me at the airport and together we drove to the cabin.  That night we all slept outside on cots by the river.  We always said we couldn’t close our eyes until we’d seen a shooting star.  The bats came out and flew over our heads.  We saw a satellite blinking through the black and starry sky.  I do not remember if we saw a shooting star. 

During our first breakfast I fought with my mother.  She was making snide remarks about Russell’s belief in magical healing, or healing oneself through proper thought and diet.  I blew up.  I said, “Mom, you say you love Russell and I but you have never made one bit of effort to understand what it is we love.  You won’t read anything about it and you criticize us for trying to be healthy.”  We fought and fought.  It was an ancient battle.  I had started one of the first health food restaurants in Boston in the late 60’s and Mom ate ice cream even though she was dying of emphysema.

                 Afterwards I realized in order to stay sane with my mother in the woods for eight days I was going to have to do a mantra.  I started repeating 3,000 times a day, “Divine Mother be with me.”  Two days later my mother came to me and said, “Please tell me what you are in to.  I really want to know.”

                 I was lying in the hammock.  She sat beside me on a little stool.  Her lovely face was open.  I told her about the spiritual paths I’d been on since I was twenty-two and the kinds of people I’d met along the way.  I talked to her about the struggles I faced in my own nature.  There was a yearning to know God but I only had the energy to reach that transcended place when my life was so horrible I needed a miracle.  Once I reached that transcended place everything my human side wanted would come to me.  If I needed money, money would come, if I needed a man, a new relationship would present itself.  Then all these things, men, money, jobs, home seduced me away from God.  Then I would have to wait for everything to fall apart again.  Trying to bare the emptiness of the false self I ruined my health with coffee, sugar and depression.  On and on I talked.  Even I didn’t understand it.

            As I told her the truth about the struggles I faced trying to find a world I could live in, a world she had never known nor wanted and didn’t understand, my heart opened to her. What a cruel joke to give a daughter like me to a mother like her.  My mother could make a box of chocolates last a year.  When she was full she stopped eating.  She was content with the slightest gesture of appreciation.  I needed a stage and a three-ring circus to entertain me.  It was like she was a bird and I a river.  She couldn’t find my mouth.  She didn’t know how to nourish me.  But that day, instead of trying to make me into something she could understand she tried to know me.  I was so grateful.  

                 The next day I continued saying my mantra, “Divine Mother be with me.”  I got up at dawn and climbed the mountain near our cabin.  I sat on a rock and took off my clothes.  Wanting the warmth of the sun I prayed with all my heart.  I could understand how people felt the sun was God.  The power, warmth and gifts the sun brings make it paramount to the human condition.  The gratitude I felt when the sun came up over Night Cap Ridge was a blessing few now know.  If you truly want to know Joy, allow yourself to be so cold, so hungry, so tired, that food, warmth and rest are ecstasy. 

                 I prayed all day hiking.  I hiked up on the Sonora Pass over St. Mary’s trail.  The first part of the hike is steep, but a half hour up and over the first ridge you enter a bowl that is several miles across and flat.  It is a moon-like landscape in a great bowl, the color of slate.  In this bowl was every color of wild flower.  In between the slate grey rock there were coral Indian paintbrush and chartreuse flowers that glowed.  There were little streams I drank from flowing over and down the rock.  “Divine Mother Be With Me.”  There were pine trees shaped by the wind and stunted by cold and a little black snake.   I walked through this wondrous land with my prayer like a pilgrim.

                 The next day, back at the cabin, I sat on a rock in the middle of the river saying my prayer.  I was annoyed.  I was bored from being at the cabin, bored with my prayer bored with my mothers constant talking.  She told stories I had heard hundreds of times.  She spoke in clichés.  In a temper I asked the stream, “Who is the Divine Mother anyway?”

In an instant I heard the answer.  The stream said, “I am the feminine face of God.” 

“What is your name?” I asked. 

She said her names were patience, forgiveness, love, and beauty.  I asked her to be with me while I was with my mother.  She said to ask in the moment she was needed.

                 That evening in the cabin after dinner during my mothers endless story I remembered Divine Mother and I prayed, “Please give me patience.  Give me Joy.  Give me all your qualities.” 

In a flash I was interested in what my mother was talking about.  That was a miracle in itself.  I began to hear parts of the story I hadn’t heard before.  My arrogance dropped away.  I asked questions about aspects of the story she hadn’t mentioned, and we laughed and laughed, imagining “what if’s”, or “who knows.”

                 In no time my mother was off to bed, very happy and I felt happy I had not turned into a horrible person, withholding my love because of my annoyance.

 

Remembering that happy moment with my mother and feeling her presence inside the cabin, I was at peace.  I put another log on the fire and began to meditate.  I slowly watched and counted my breaths as Ram Dass taught me thirty-eight years ago.  With the inhale you think “rising” and with the exhale you think “falling”.  I have counted to a thousand, “rising” and “falling”, most days of my life since then.  At some point the words disappear and I look at what is behind the breath.  It is a deep, still, indescribable place that nothing I know me to be can identify with.  I touch it then am thrown back.  My ego finds something to complain about or fear, and though I try not to listen, I can’t help myself.

I made a bed in the living room because the bedroom was too cold, and with a dog on each side of me we slept and snored our way through our first night.