THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING
Or, two weeks without Donald Trump and indoor plumbing. Vicki and I have returned from our two week meditation retreat on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, Canada. It seems as though things are more like they are now than they’ve ever been before.
After two weeks of silence and a short ferry ride back to Vancouver Island, I was actually debating whether or not to check my email, Twitter feed, and dive headfirst back into politics south of the 49th parallel. But the decision was made for me when we walked into the lobby of the Sidney Waterfront Inn on Victoria Island, where we were overnighting in preparation for a Sunday morning flight back to Tucson.
The TV in the lobby was tuned to a Canadian news station. The sound was off, but the chiron was “Firestorm Rages Over Donald Trump Jr. Meeting With Russian Lawyer.” I’m still not sure what that means, but any firestorm raging around the Trump family seems like a positive development. It’ll probably take me a day or three to catch up on developments since July 1, but in the meantime, if you’re interested in a summary of the trip, read on.
We left Tucson on Saturday afternoon, July 2, taking Alaska Airlines to Seattle and catching a 24 minute flight from there to Victoria, on Vancouver Island. We spent the night in the Sidney Waterfront Inn and got up early to catch the 9:00 am ferry to Salt Spring Island, where we hooked up with a few other retreatants and bounced up a bumpy dirt road to the top of Mt. Tuam and the KDOL (Kunzang Dechen Ozel Ling) retreat center, founded in 1976.
It’s a sprawling place, designed for extended retreats with Spartan accommodations to minimize distractions. We stayed in a cabin in a lovely pine forest and great views of the Strait of Georgia. When we were there in March, 2016, it rained constantly. This time it was bright and sunny, with highs in the 60s or 70s and lows cool enough to warrant the use of comforters at night. Our cabin had electricity and a sink with a cold water tap, but no toilet or shower. I’m not much of a woodsman, but I got used to the outhouse pretty quickly. My Facebook timeline has a few photos, including one of the outhouse. Check that out if you want some pictures of the scenery.
The retreat began on July 2, and is scheduled to last until the end of the month. The retreat’s leader is Doug Veenhof, and our cook was a woman my age named Judith, who lives at KDOL most of the year. There are/were a shifting group of 12-15 attendees at any one time, with people staying as long as their circumstances permitted. Some of them were old friends. There was also a herd of friendly black tailed deer that hung around looking for handouts, which they often received.
The teachings we studied fall under the heading of Dzogchen (again, try Wikipedia if you want an explanation). We went into silence on Day 2, and everyone was pretty good about observing the no talking rule. Each day began at 6:30 with three rounds of meditation before breakfast.
Today, we divide a day up into 24 units of 60 minutes each. In medieval India, they reversed those numbers, creating a day that consisted of 60 units of 24 minutes each, called ghatikas. Our meditation periods, then, consisted of 24 minutes, followed by a 6 minute break to stretch, grab some water, or run to the nearest outhouse.
There were 90 minute breaks for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and there were three 90 minute teaching sessions during the day, in the morning, afternoon, and evening (the teacher talked; if we had questions, submitted them in writing). The last session ended between 8:00-8:30 pm. The island is on daylight savings time, and the sun didn’t set until around 9:30 pm. I was almost always asleep by the time it got dark.
Doug is a nice guy in addition to being a great teacher, and his philosophy is, “It’s your retreat. Do what you need to do to make the most of it.” In other words, sleep late if you need to, go for a walk in the woods, take naps, do some yoga – whatever it takes to come back to your meditation cushion with a clear, fresh mind.
I took him up on that proposition, but I still found the retreat physically challenging. At 70, I have arthritis in my hips and neck. I could ease the pressure on my hips by varying positions – sitting cross-legged, sitting in a chair, and even standing. But holding my head still for 24 minutes aggravated my arthritic neck. Towards the end of our stay, my dear friend and teacher Jarret rigged up a fortress of props that allowed me to lean back into a neck support that finally took the pressure off.
The only advantage of this “fortress” was that it was sometimes conducive to drowsiness. We were trying to achieve a state that combined relaxation and alertness. I was pretty good at the former, but often struggled with the latter. We often associate relaxation with sleep, and when we let go of agitation, distraction, and worry, it’s easy to toggle straight into a siesta.
I know people who have done silent solitary retreats for three years. They say their teachers told them to make sure they had no unfinished emotional business with anyone, because they’d take those issues into retreat with them, mentally rehashing old arguments that the other party may have long since forgotten.
Two weeks isn’t three years, but I was concerned that I’d spend the retreat writing blog posts about what Donald Trump might be doing. Oddly enough, that didn’t happen. It was surprisingly easy to let go of politics for two weeks. Instead of surfing the web on Saturday evening, I luxuriated in our shower and flush toilet. We flew home on Sunday, arriving just in time for a big monsoon storm that evening.
It was good to have done the retreat, and it’s good to be back. My usual blather will resume shortly.