Five days ago, I emerged from the community of fasters, stories, and the wilderness solo I wrote about in my last post. It is strange, this notion of “community”; we go out on the land alone, but our time out there is “book-ended” with sacred circles. The night before we disperse to our individually chosen fasting spots, we sit together to name aloud our intention for our time in the wilderness. The day we come back in to rejoin the world, we sit in circle to share the stories of our experiences during the four day/four night solo; we take turns mirroring one another’s story in an offering of affirmation, insight and beauty. After a shower and small celebratory dinner back in the city, we go our separate ways to the larger communities of which we are parts. Perhaps the time together in circle helps us to transition: prior to the solo, as a knowing community who sends each other out with understanding and blessings; afterward, as a community sharing the joys and challenges of the experience and helping each other to give voice to what has transpired on the land.
Since returning to my island home, I have found life moving much too fast. On the first day back, I was overly sensitive emotionally and found the medical issues of loved ones too much to listen to without shedding tears. For the second and third days after my return, I had small klutzy accidents as I tried to reorient myself in the smaller spaces of home, grocery aisles, and on the roadways. Now I am trying to merge back into the flow of work, writing, and basic “life maintenance”. I find this exhausting.
As I look back over the few journal entries I had the energy to write last week, I see that I was consistently hungry, constantly in physical discomfort (migraine and sciatica), and yet able to treasure the beauty around me:
It’s so hard to do this writing because I’m absolutely starving, all of a sudden. I just want to take a nap in this luscious sun. I forgot that I snoozed in the sun a bit earlier today and I realized what a blessing it is, how I always want to take advantage of the sunny days at home: to spend an hour in the sun. Without exception, every night out here I have been woken up multiple times. Nearly each time, I was offered something of Beauty. Two owls flew through my site, not ten feet above my head; the moon waxing full and bright was framed between two ponderosa trunks; coyotes sang and howled; a beetle with an ant in its mouth crawled just inches from my face; and Orion perfectly framed between the boughs of the twenty-ish ponderosas that surrounded my sleeping spot shined down on me…each of these Beautiful (or somewhat disconcerting, in the case of the beetle and its treasure) gifts would have gone unnoticed had I not been woken by the sounds of rushing wind in the pines, the need to care for bodily issues in the middle of the night, or the simple rustling of the ocean spray bush inches from my head.
Yes, there were moments of fear, sadness, boredom, hunger and loneliness out there. Each time one of these less-than-welcome visitors greeted me, I was able to use the opportunity to explore my own internal hungers and fears, to journey through my inner landscape in which “Sad” and “Lonely” find homes. I was able to relish the choice I had made to go out on this journey into the wilderness. I was able to remember that the exercise is not a self-serving act but rather part of the journey to bring my gifts, work, strength and love back to my community upon return. I listened to the land, saw the bones and hooves of a dead deer along with the startling beauty of a yellow barked snag on a hilltop. I come back now to my community – with ALL its physical comforts and abundance – and I will thrive anew. A small grove of ponderosa pines facing toward a sage scrub hillside across the ravine held and taught me about pain and beauty, abundance and life, peace and joy, the cycles of giving and receiving.
There is so much more I could write, and probably with greater thought and depth than the musings I quickly typed here. I imagine, then, that I will revisit this topic repeatedly in future blog entries.
(Note on photo below: I’ve included the same picture for this blog entry because it shows the small grove in which I sought shelter and refuge last week. My solo spot is tucked precisely in the middle of this picture.)
