Like a silent retreat after day four

“Saw” M_____ yesterday on video. M_____ S_____, that is. She asked if I missed physical contact, and my honest answer was, “I’m not sure.” I said I missed seeing Mom, and I supposed I missed seeing my barber. And it’s true that after our previous session I really missed seeing her in person and feeling her presence in the room. But to be honest, I don’t miss all the travel. The tyranny of travel! I mean, between travel and waiting room time an appointment with M_____ took two hours over its forty-five minute length. It’s not just that, though. I get into such a zen state being in my quiet house, with my little routines, and giving such attention to everything around me (after our session yesterday I went into the kitchen for some reason, and as I left my bedroom I was like, “Ah, the sounds of my door opening” “The feel of walking into the kitchen” “The pull of the faucet handle” “The sound and white glimmer of water flowing.” There was a little bit of God in that moment! It was one of those moments like James Finley from the “Secrets of the Mystics” podcast at Center for Action and Contemplation was talking about, that we have these occasional moments when God reveals himself to us. And in between, it’s like we’re stomping around our lives, bored, angry, sullen, and in need of entertainment.

M_____ asked what I would put in a time capsule to remember this time. “The daily doings of my life,” I said, “that have been crowding into my writing time. But not in a bad way. The things that before were to be scheduled, minimized, because they got in the way of my writing: now they fill my morning.” What it feels like to wash my own clothes. The unexpected joy of eating Kashi whole wheat cereal (dosed up with sugar and cinnamon!) in the morning after a winter of eating hot oatmeal. The taste, last night, of fresh salad—and good salad: mustard greens, that John had bought for me—after two weeks of me eating pasta every night. Sitting on the porch with a hot cup of tea, wearing my jacket against a breezy, cool late afternoon or early evening, and not doing something else while I’m out there (“let me check my Scruff” “let me write some text messages to people” “I should call Mom” “let me see how P_____ is doing” “I can use this time to brainstorm ideas for that problem in the book”). Instead I’m watching for birds, and not necessarily disappointed if I don’t see any!

I had said to M_____, “It feels like a silent retreat, and I’ve already gotten past the first three or four days that are hard.” Or like my contemplative meditation prayer, that I can actually sit for about twenty minutes now, and yes, the first minutes are harder, but I get to a point that I can just sit there, and am even indifferent about whether to get up or just sit longer. It’s restful, and my head’s clear (mostly). As much as I’m an interior person, even I can be tyrannical with myself, that my interiority needs to be applied to something. Now that the daily doings of my life—locating food for the next week, washing and drying two items of clothes I’ve worn the last four days; haha, cleaning and dusting and vaccuuming still hasn’t made the list!—have crowded into my day and are taking as much time as they merit, perhaps there’s a balance between all the parts of me that make me a person.