Friday,June 19^th, 2015

Another beautiful day in paradise. Each day I sink deeper into the peace and calm that surrounds me in this lusciously nurturing place. Come join me once again and vicariously experience life on retreat. Maybe you’ll even decide to create a retreat for yourself before too long.

I’m back to my usual disturbed sleep pattern, but with the CBD-enriched hemp oil on hand, the four hours of sleep are of higher quality, allowing me to go deep enough to have dreams. Last night I dreamt I borrowed someone’s car and went on a very long and exciting trip to unfamiliar lands and couldn’t find my way back.

Over the years, I’ve learned to accept and adapt to the sleep deprivation. Somehow, in this peaceful place, it doesn’t seem to matter so much.

Today one of the participants, Jane Lipman, published poet and red-headed goddess, handed me a piece of paper torn from her notebook. She wrote the words below during a writing session while I lay in my sickbed under the apple tree at the beginning of the retreat.

Dear Erica, let the pain in your head turn into bell sounds crashing, thundering, transforming into ripples on a lake, spiraling out and out and out into loon cries…. into dragonflies drifting on the pond….into cottonwood fluff slowly sailing through blue air over the lawn….into melody, rhythm, bird whistles….into the joy, love, brilliance, wonder that you are….held in stillness….pain gone….beauty slowing way down into black butterfly time.

In between long stretches of soaking in the silence, we gather to engage in creative acts. And in the evenings we gather in the meditation hall to write. The writing resembles Natalie Goldberg style in which we’re given a topic and then we write nonstop for ten minutes, never allowing the pen to leave the page or stop writing, as a way to bypass the self-critic and let the juicy feelings percolate to the surface without the filter.

Alicia read us a poem about a boy who had a secret. He kept the secret from the world. In the end, the shameful thing he was trying to hide turned out to be his gift to the world. So, our writing assignment was “What is your secret?” Our pens moved fast and furiously across the page. When the ten minutes were up, Alicia asked for volunteers to read about their secret. When it was my turn, I began to read, “My Secret. I’m eccentric….”

Before I could complete the sentence, the normally reverent group burst into irreverent laughing. I heard someone say, “You really think that’s a secret?” Someone else said, “We all know you’re eccentric, Erica. That’s why we love you.” And then another voice said, “We’re all eccentric.”

The piece I wrote was about growing up in many different places and cultures here and abroad, as an army brat, then on my own volition as an adult, which left me feeling different, wherever I went. The gift of “my secret” is that I’m less likely to “swallow the collective Kool-Aid” and am able to think out of the box, with a different perspective, especially useful in regards to medicine and the way it is practiced in the States.

Robert Conrad wrote a Haiku poem in that writing session, called “The Secret,” about my revelation that I have an untold secret.

A secret held tight.

Your chest frozen, shoulders hunched.

We already knew.

Robert Conrad offered me one of his Haiku poems he wrote in our writing session. It’s called, “Lesson on Listening.” Here it is:

Sat still listening

Awaiting enlightenment.

All I got was flies.

Alicia tells us today we are pilgrims, wandering in the wilderness wherever we are called. I look up and see Hall’s Peak beckoning me. With excitement I pack my bagged lunch and prepare for the solo journey upwards. Then a little voice within reminds me I’m not the same person I used to be. Solo jaunts into the high country run the risk of falls from my visual problems—double vision with no depth perception and limited peripheral vision. Just at that moment, Elizabeth from Hawaii walked up and asked if I would join her on a hike up the mountain. Oh yes. Certainly.

Hall’s peak offers a striking contrast to the feminine, inviting, lusciousness of the valley below. The flanks of the mountain are covered with forbidding scrub oak that tears at the skin and rips the pants as we bushwhack our way up, careful not to step on the miniature budding cacti scattered here and there, and always on the watch for snakes. We were too busy scrambling through the brush to take pictures.

We rejoiced when we found elk poop because it meant there would be a semblance of a trail made by the large animals. We kept our heads down, following the trail of poop. Along the way, we ran into a large elk carcass ripped to shreds, probably by a mountain lion. There was still meat on the bones giving off a foul odor. I couldn’t help wondering how recent the slaughter took place. We kept going, finding more skeletal parts along the way. We finally exited the tangle of thorny bushes onto some large boulders just below the summit. We sat down and ate our lunch as we gazed at the peaceful, bucolic valley spread out below. It wasn’t long before the sky turned dark. Magnificent and menacing clouds accompanied claps of thunders.

The old Erica of long ago would have said, “Let’s run to the summit before the lightning strikes.” That girl is no longer with us. I turned to Elizabeth and said knowingly, “It would be wise for us to head down right now. We don’t need to make the summit. We can still have a good time without reaching the top.”

How liberating it is to not have to get to the top, not have to be perfect, not have to be right, not have all the answers, without pretense. One of the silver linings of the disasters I’ve endured is being stripped of most of what I thought was important—and left with the true essentials. My load has been lightened significantly. Suffering has the potential to do that.

Just as we reached the valley below, we were greeted by a hailstorm. Ice balls the size of tiny, unripe apricots pounded on our heads, followed by a driving rain. The Navajo call this kind of rain “male rain.” The gentle, more misty and inviting rain they call “female rain.”

Alicia leads us in many creative activities, like dancing, singing, and sculpting with clay. The point of these activities is to let go of the need to make something important or beautiful, or the need to sing an arresting song with perfect pitch. The point, like the timed writings, is to let the creative juices flow without a goal in mind, without judgment, without the need for a certain outcome. The result is a marvelous cacophony of authentic sounds and movements right from the very core of our being. It’s an effective way to free up potent energies waiting to be released out of their cages. When I do these exercises without inhibition, I feel so wild and free. I feel like I’m a tribal woman from a part of Africa that’s never been “discovered” by modern man. All my fervent desires to sing in tune are put aside as I allow some soulful sounds to pour out from a very deep place within me.

One afternoon Alicia placed a block of clay in front of each of us and told us to do whatever we wanted with the clay without any preconceived notion of what kind of shapes we intended to make. We were urged to play with the clay and let the shapes emerge by themselves. I was surprised at what emerged. First there was a hollow tube supported by enormous feet. Then came a round disk on top of the tube. At some point it dawned on me that the clay shapes were turning into a wild African woman. Moments after that realization, Alicia asked us to do something to our creation that would be utterly outrageous and shocking. Without thinking, I added an oversized, erect penis to the wild woman. Pretty outrageous, don’t you think?

Carol, originally from England, is the cook for the retreat. She is given the challenging task of accommodating all of the participants’ eating requirements. Since half the participants are my patients, they are on either an organic, GMO-free paleo diet or a well thought-out whole food vegan diet. On top of that, some participants are allergic to garlic, some to onions, some to something else…and so on. And then there are the participants who prefer the standard fare. Can you imagine how creative Carol has to be to keep everyone well fed and happy? She’s a real culinary artist.

This will be the last posting from Ocamora. I’ll be back in the saddle on Monday, June 22nd. Thank you for joining me on this deeply restorative retreat. I hope some of the peace and calm rubbed off on you.

May you be peaceful

May you be happy

May you love and accept all of who you are. 

And may you lie peacefully in the arms of your true, radiant, all knowing, magnificent self.

With love and tenderness from your friend,

Erica