retreating

*note: though rivendell has wireless, and i did have my computer with me, i refrained from blogging until i got home. it was a mighty struggle.

I spent the weekend at rivendell. frodo and the other hobbits say hi. actually this rivendell is a retreat center on bowen island. it's a beautiful place. a friend once described it, "it's like a pottery barn on top of a mountain overlooking the ocean." the consumer evilness of pottery barn aside, it's a pretty accurate description. it's pretty beautiful place. this was my third time there.i sat at this desk.
this was the view.
between staring out the window and reading i did a lot of this. it was quite invigorating. that's a good sign, seeing as how i will soon be working on a arts thesis project.

retreats are interesting. first you're all excited to get away, and you throw yourself down on your bed and heave a great sigh of relief and relaxation. after a while though, it gets kind of hard to stay in this relaxed state. you get kind of sick of the small supply of food you've brought and crave something, like, say, a doughnut. after a while you want someone to talk to. the soul is not used to so much quiet. you wonder things like if your friends notice you're gone, because by golly they should. The Buddhists call this "monkey mind." It is the description of the mind of a person who is not in the present moment, like a monkey that goes from tree to tree tasting a piece of fruit from each and then dropping it and moving on to the next tree. We jump from thought to thought and project to project without really ever being in the present and fully experiencing everything we are doing at a given time.
it takes an effort to calm the mind and let go of insecurities such as this and to appreciate the silence, to open yourself to God and to a depth of thought that is hard to get in everyday life. most of the time, it seems like we're just skimming the surface, and have neither the time nor courage to see what's in our heads. Retreats make us stop, and slow down. it takes a certain degree of work to be on a retreat. but it is good work. kind of like the feeling you get when you're washing dishes and you can space out on the simplicity of the task.
i was both happy and sad to come back. retreats are temporary things, gotta come back to the real world at some point. you just have to bring the peace back with you somehow. henri nouwen's book "the genessee diary" is a more in depth look at this tension of being needing to be apart and also needing to be in the world. he spent 6 months at a trappist monastery. it's interesting to see how the seeds of other books he's written began in this journal that he kept.