Retreat

I wrote this poem in 2012.

Now, it occurs to me that people who were born in 2012 are currently twelve years old, which is a horrifying thing for a Gen-X-er to contemplate. Almost certainly, I haven’t made nearly as much progress as those imps, but perhaps I’ve set up an impossible metric there. They’ve had biology on their side.

None of that is relevant to the topic at hand. Let’s start over.

I wrote “Retreat” on a silent meditation retreat led by the great Shinzen Young, and I wrote it because I was feeling like an idiot.

Right before the retreat an actor buddy of mine had asked me why I took the trouble (and it is trouble) to attend these infernal things, and my response consisted of the weird gibberings of a spaced out child.

It’s not that I didn’t have an answer, but the answer was a feeling, one I didn’t know how to articulate. Hence, gibberings.

As the retreat unfolded over the following weeks, I spent some unconscionable percentage of my time fixating on that conversation and straining to come up with the missing words. (I say unconscionable because on meditation retreats one is supposed to meditate, not obsess over a failed attempt to explain oneself.)

The morning before the retreat ended this poem tumbled out. It was spontaneous, one of those flow-state thingies that neuroscience people who give TED talks talk about. I’ve never edited it. It felt right the way it was, which, as anyone who’s ever tried to write anything will tell you, never happens.

Certain topics exceed the reach of prose. Bach’s Cantatas, the death of a great love, the color carmine, and to be sure, the almost violent determination that keeps a few peculiar persons returning again and again to the contemplative path.

Why do we do this? Why, in spite of the dangers, rigors, and blinding absence of any material reward do we turn again and again from family, career, and pleasure to sit like statues for weeks or months, with only the shufflings and sighings of our neighboring meditators for company?

When muggle language fails, one resorts to poetry.

“Retreat” was a hit in my old meditation community. My teacher George used to read it during class series and on retreats, and it touched something in their meditators’ hearts.

This past April I somehow felt moved to share it again at a retreat led by Har-Prakash Khalsa, one of Shinzen’s senior students, and Shinzen himself, who made a three day appearance. I read it aloud in the closing circle, and the same thing happened. My fellow meditators proffered compliments I didn’t know how to accept. Some wept.

I don’t know why. Maybe it gets at something they too wish they could explain. Maybe like me they’d found themselves flailing to give words to the radiant paradox at the heart of this practice, which is to say, of life. Maybe “Retreat” touches that place in its own plain, unornamented way.

Anyway, I’ve already said too much. Here’s the poem.

P.S. The above photo was taken in Cochise Stronghold, Arizona at the end of the first week of the retreat, and Shinzen insisted on wearing my hat and shades. He kept shouting, “Heisenberg, Heisenberg!” It was great.

Retreat

i

I come so my knees will hurt.
I come in order not to know
what to do or where to turn.
I come to find the end of my rope,
the edge of my friendliness,
the secret nerve,
strangled, crying out.

I come so my back will hurt,
and so my companions can drive me
crimson with rage, as if they were
intruders on some sacred site.

I come and sit like this, like this,
in the center of my joy and horror,
atop a tower of uncertainty,
naked, without help.

I come to learn
silently, slowly,
to be the aching, beautiful thing
that I am.

ii

We come so our hearts will break.
We come and sit like this, like this,
in the center of our joy and horror,
and so we begin,
late or early,
hopeful or bereft,
warrior or refugee,
to know the impossible
sweetness and difficulty
that is our inheritance.