Soul Mountain Retreat #1

In my last post I mused on mothering and monasticism. Today I'm entering the adventure of planned solitude in community at Marilyn Nelson's Soul Mountain Retreat. I will mark each day of this retreat with a blog entry. For two-and-a-half weeks I'll be away from family and work in Goshen, Indiana and the constant chores of the house and the old cars and the weedy garden. This is the first time I've been away from the family for more than a week--ever. And I've been a mother and writer for 24 years.

At Soul Mountain--a spacious house on 6 acres of woods in Southern Connecticut that borders a nature preserve--I help with chores and cook for myself and have my own cozy bedroom with two beautiful views. The two other women here right now each go their own way, offering friendly advice and occasional brief conversation, but otherwise we are all engrossed in our writing and solitude. Harmonious parallel play. Writing, and the solitude and self-care and contemplation that go with it, are honored in this space. Writing is not a guilty pleasure here. It is what we do. That and eat and sleep and walk in the woods. My writing desk and laptop face the window that looks out over a long kidney-shaped pond with a spillway--Peanut Pond--and a wooded slope of the nature preserve beyond. It faces southwest, so I can watch the sun set every night beyond the computer screen to my left. During the day I can watch the clouds change the color of the water and tree shadows root themselves deeply into the pond's surface. For more information about Soul Mountain visit www.soulmountainretreat.com

Last night, in preparation for my departure for Soul Mountain, I never went to bed. I stayed up all night in my office at Goshen College, commenting on student papers, organizing files, cleaning off my two desks heaped with months of papers, sorting through stacks and stacks of papers in boxes, on the floor, under the desk. My impetus was to clean up my office for visiting poet Rhoda Janzen who will use it during my absence. Rhoda's a dear friend, and I will miss hosting her, but she was a great sport and urged me onto Soul Mountain. As a writer she knows how precious two plus weeks of solitude can be. So I am here.

In cleaning the office, I found several boxes of files I had abandoned when Mother died two years ago during May Term while I was teaching Native American Lit. I never finished my filing for that course, nor for the courses I had taught the previous semester while she way dying, and I was at her place every day and in and out of doctors' offices and the emergency room with her. Two years' of stuff had accumulated over these unsorted piles. I read in Buddha, Zen, Toa, Tantra by Osho that "mind is the accumulation of incomplete thoughts." Well, one could certainly have said that about my office. Yes, there are still piles, but small manageable ones I can finally deal with when I get home. Yes, still there is the accumulation of incomplete thoughts. But the pressure is much less. I'm beginning to break through the iceberg of grief and move forward in a more graceful way embodying my life.

Somehow the sorting and cleaning and working through energized me enough to keep my going till 3:45 a.m. when I drove home to take a shower, throw some things in a suitcase and go with Lizzie to the airport to catch a 6am flight.

Lizzie, bless her soul, had gotten up at three to come over to the house and drive me in a drenching downpour to South Bend Airport, 50 minutes away. When I pulled up in the driveway from my night marathon in the office she was making me scrambled eggs. I hustled to take a shower and throw together a few things for the trip. We loaded up her slow old Honda Accord, Jeanie, who is filled with almost as much debris as my office was. Her mothering and baby paraphernalia is stashed over the dried flowers and empty juice bottles and audiotapes of her student days. In the midst of leaving I was panicked that I couldn't find my cell phone, so I rushed back into the house and took Julia's phone and charger so I could call home. Such wonderful daughters I have. Lizzie's steady, calm company on the way was like a quiet music. She looked so sweet and determined in her new glasses, the street lamps casting a dim glow on her face. When she dropped me off I was so tired I could barely manage getting the luggage out of the car. One more minute dawdling and I would have missed the plane.

One the ride from Chicago to Harford I sat by a young mother from Italy and her four-month-old daughter Alethea. The two of them made beautiful harmony and nursed openly and happily in the plane. (Curses on that stewardess who had a woman thrown off a plane last year for nursing a baby.) She reminded me of Lizzie driving home from the airport to her 9-month-old daughter Willow. Someday these babies will be driving their mothers somewhere, their mothers who were once so young and in tune with their daughter's bodies and rhythms.

Of course, when I got to Hartford, there was my cell phone in the backpack. It had flown with me the entire time in the overhead baggage compartment, and I had never even turned it off in flight.