Notes to Myself
Your real duty is to go away from the community to find your bliss. — Joseph Campbell
What part of myself, I wonder, am I trying to find, to save? The need to retreat from media, to regain something I once knew, has the urgency of survival. On the second day of my retreat here at Saint Meinrad Archabbey, stillness begins to win over the part that wants to keep up with people and news. That wants the action of entertainment. It is so easy for me to forget that stillness is a way of knowing, of apprehending presence, of inhabiting the room of belonging. Time spreads out for paper, pens, paint, books and walking. The refreshment of beech trees rattling their leaves in the winter woods. Reading and writing. Sorting my tools.
There is something so restorative about the physicality of a place and the reckoning that comes with being fully embodied and uninterrupted. I remember how the saving mystery breaks through at odd and unforeseeable moments. There are many thoughts on the subject of places having memory, of places remembering what people forget. But the first thing I noticed on my arrival was something I have never seen here before: about 100 black vultures and a few dozen crows circling the sky above where I am staying. The black vultures have only recently entered this area in such great numbers, and are more aggressive than the native turkey vultures. They have an ominous reputation that calls to mind the birds of Mordor. The second thing I noticed was the green sprouts of crocus already up in the woods. The dark and the light, the evil and the good, both ever present.
Sign up for my online class beginning Mar 19: online class
All 3 sessions will be recorded.
“Turn me into song…”
How do you refresh your relationship with what is sacred?
The ancient idea of having a gatekeeper, a guardian for a sacred place, returns at a time when most gates have become porous to continuous interruptions — we are all “on call.” But without the stability of a gatekeeper that protects the threshold as barrier, the lightning-fast change that we are all a part of overruns its bounds, and transformation becomes a superficial commodity.
The kind of work that emerges when everyone agrees to protecting uninterrupted time is unpredictable, powerful, and often a breakthrough for the maker. This is what keeps me teaching — the delight that comes from doing work that you don’t already know how to do, from doing things that may be “ugly” or surprising or unexpected by taking the risk to be unavailable to anyone except the muse, by dipping into the Unknown.
What follows are some examples from the students in my recent class in San Francisco, a magnificent group. The work speaks for itself.