Butternut Woolens

I used to be a lot braver than I am now.

I used to do things like fly alone to Mexico City at 2am because when I landed in San Diego to meet up with my friend, she decided she didn't want to go on this vacation after all and at an outdoor cafe on the beach passed me a hand scribbled note from our third friend living off Honduras' Mosquito Coast to meet him after dark in the zocolo in Oaxaca and I thought they had a firm itinerary and had at least coordinated on the phone, but apparently that wasn't the case because phone lines didn't extend to oil rigs in the Caribean Sea and cell phones hadn't been invented yet and I didn't know my credit card was maxed out, but what the hell, I already bought the tickets and it could be fun.

Then spend that night and the next few days fending off amorous men who couldn't understand the strange and apparently exciting idea that a single woman who didn't speak Spanish was wandering around ancient Zapotec ruins by herself in the desert countryside for 3 days and waiting after dark in the zocolo for 3 nights for a friend I hadn't seen in 3 years who was supposedly taking a second-class chicken bus from Honduras according to a random scrap of paper torn from the back of a letter I hadn't read.

Then both of us flying in a Pringles can, mostly above the forest canopy, into the Peten jungle and sneaking illegally into the Mayan ruins at Tikal after dark and almost running into a tapir and sleeping on a 3 foot wide ledge halfway up the side of a pyramid temple belonging to a culture who performed human sacrifices while what was left of the Sandinista rebels shot off mortars and automatic rifles, and jaguars prowled below looking for the tapir, and being jerked awake in the dark by the otherworldly shrieking of warring bands of howler monkeys in the trees overhead and momentarily panicking thinking there was incoming gunfire with all the racket while warm mist visibly flowed like fast water through the temple in the gloom like a scene from an Indiana Jones movie and all my return plane tickets were stolen except the one from Denver to Bozeman, but when you have to fly from the jungle deep in northern Guatamala being able to go from Denver to Bozeman is cold comfort.

Yeah.

I'm currently reading Pema Chodron's The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. She also wrote When Things Fall Apart which my friend Susie who has cancer calls, When Shit Happens. Chodron was my go-to author in 2009, she inspired this whole Year of Doing Nothing, and as I said before, she's a Buddhist nun living in a monastery while I am not, but much of what she says is inspiring in a quiet, deep and truthful way. So I decided I would learn more about meditation which is the first step in becoming fearless.

I enrolled in the Beginner's Mind retreat at the Great Vow Zen Monastery in December. It was even better than the Mindful Eating retreat I had done the year before.

I had really been looking forward to the Mindful Eating retreat last year because my stomach constantly hurt and as a consequence I was living on Starbursts and tea, but the morning I was to go, my mind started scaring me.

Mind: What if it's weird? What if there are weird people? What if I do something stupid and offend a monk? How embarrassing. Will there be plenty of hot water? Can I have tea with caffeine in it? Or do I have to drink some weird kind of tea that tastes like burnt rope? I don't know how to meditate, what if I cough, will the monks glare at me? What if my back hurts so bad I can't even stand it and I start fidgeting? What if it's boring-ugh. God, I hope there's not shellfish. What if all the food has mushrooms in it? There's just no way I can eat a huge portobello mushroom. What if there's rubbery tofu or some other disgusting thing. What if I throw up at the table-OMG! HOW WILL I SURVIVE THIS?

You'd think for someone who managed to sleep in the jungle of a foreign country and get out alive and unraped that eating vegetarian food and hanging out with Buddhist monks for a weekend would be a no brainer.

I almost didn't go. At the last possible minute, I just threw myself into the car and went, what the hell, even if it's flat out bizarre, at least I'll learn to meditate and even my HMO doctor recommended that.

It was a profound experience. I was sitting on a bench out front at dusk the first evening before the retreat started, just listening to the geese making their way along the Columbia River and I was feeling peaceful, knitting a little and listening to the geese. Suddenly I realized that the fear had lifted, like someone lifting off a heavy load. Not only the fear of being there and doing something out of my comfort zone, but the ordinary, walking-around-fear had lifted, too. I felt extraordinarily safe. The feeling contrasted so sharply with my every day experience that I was able to see and understand very clearly just how afraid I truly had been.

Terrified really.

Divorce is scary. Raising young children by yourself is scary. Not having a place to live is scary. Not having a job is scary. But all these fears are compounded when one spouse is mentally ill and no one really understands what's going on. I had been living subconsciously with the fear that one day I'd either find him dead in the barn, or he'd finally come unwired and kill us all with a CPU.

Mister Ex's mental health had been spotty at best and deteriorating over the years, but now was resulting in even more extreme behavior. He was calling my friends and relatives for no particular reason other than sheer obsession, people he had never bothered to call in 11 years of marriage. He was calling my pastor during Easter week, a person he had never met, to ask her if he could answer any of her questions. Of course, she told me this, then paused and raised her eyebrows as if to ask, "Why is he doing this? Would you like to tell me something?" I just said, "Thanks, he's not rational right now. Sorry he bothered you during this very busy time, he's just inappropriate sometimes and I don't know how far he's going to go any more."

During court-ordered mediation he looked like he was going to have either a heart attack or a complete breakdown, he was blotchy-faced and sweating buckets, rambling in his speech, couldn't hold eye contact, kept repeating himself over and over, kept crossing his legs over his crotch and squirming. He seemed on the verge of a psychotic break. Ask me how I know. The mediator asked me in private afterwards if I wanted a security escort to my car.

I felt a burning embarrassment and shame which was nothing compared to how angry I was with him, not only for acting strangely now, but for all those years of imposed celibacy and for lying to me at the beginning of it all.

The monks and nuns at Great Vow are wonderful, kind, caring people and most of them are younger than me, except for the co-abbots. Everything about the retreat and the facility was explained, no one cares if you screw up, there's always going to be another opportunity to practice. Everyone is practicing, even the people who have been there for years. I mean, that's the point. That's what they do. Practice. The most important thing I learned is that I hold my anxiety in my abdomen, when I'm paying attention I can feel it in there as a clenching, tight ball and it makes eating painful. The Mindful Eating retreat was led by Chozen Bays, one of the co-abbots and author of the book Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food. Which by the way, comes with a CD of guided meditations like those we practiced at the retreat.

This year I went back for the Beginner's Mind Retreat which is a weekend slice of monastic life, created to teach more meditation techniques and how to deal with obstructions. I'll explore that more in the next post, this one's becoming unmanageably large and I need to dye some yarn today before the temperature plunges to single digits tomorrow. Hang in there, more to come.

To be cont.