Pendle Hill

This is the last day of my 5-day sojourn at Pendle Hill, a Quaker community outside Philadelphia. It's been just right. I have spent most of it writing in my closed room, a simple space in the brick "Main House." I go down for meals or the daily Meeting for Worship, or to raid the granola stash. I've had some good walks around the property, including several rounds through the bamboo labyrinth.

The people who live here are kind and welcoming, as you might imagine. They've chosen to be part of a very deliberate community, and everyone helps out with dishes, furniture repair, folding laundry. There are several students here -- most at least 40 years old -- who have come for spiritual guidance, Quaker study, and Pendle Hill's courses on art and spirituality. The students come from all over the world and stay for a couple of months or longer.

I'm comfortable here, in a Quaker setting. If my life circumstances were different, I could actually see myself living at Pendle Hill for an extended period of time. But if I lived here, I'd want to shake things up just a bit.

There's not a lot of humor, self-deprecating or otherwise, and I feel myself keeping my own sense of humor on a leash. A number of people sojourn here under spiritual duress: some have lost their way spiritually, some are just pretty serious folk. By definition, they're comfortable with silence, and sometimes that energy feels a little heavy. You don't hear a lot of guffawing.

Yesterday I made the smallest joke and my lunch table cracked up with surprise. Funny seems to be a surprise in a spiritual community, and that is something I'd want to be otherwise.

But I'm grateful to this community for taking me in for this sojourn. I am leaving a donation for the student from Benin who arrived a week ago and is as skinny as a broom. He has been cold ever since his plane touched down. I want to buy him some long underwear for the winter.

I'm also going to refresh the "Bacon Endowment" for the kitchen. Ten years ago a sojourner left a $75 contribution to buy a few bacon breakfasts for the community. They ate their way through that in short order, but became attached to having bacon now and then. Now it's a treat every couple of weeks. Everyone came for bacon breakfast a few days ago. We ate strips of a local, organically raised pig, which made us feel better about the indulgence. But I think we would have eaten bacon imported by fossil fuel from Argentina and carried the long way around the globe, it smelled so good.

Because other than that, the food is mostly vegan, and local produce. In December, the pickings are slimmer than other times of year, and the emphasis is on...let's say the durability of the cellulose. Last night was the weekly silent dinner, and we ate raw cabbage and onion, cooked kale, and a lentil salad. Since there was no conversation, the crunch, crunch, crunch throughout the dining hall was pretty funny. Thank goodness I wasn't allowed to say anything. I was so tempted to moo.

sojourn

For more than two months, I sat on the waiting list for a week-long meditation retreat that begins tomorrow. One hundred people will spend a week in silence together, alternating sitting meditations and walking meditations. I've been looking forward to it. But I haven't been able to get excited about it because of the waiting list thing.

After you pay the retreat fee, you wait to see if others bail. I start off somewhere around number 30 when I sign up, and soon am number 26. By late October I'm 13th in line. Then I don't hear anything ever again. I begin to wonder if this is a test. You clear your week, and wait to see if you are called. It's a game of Zen chicken.

I'm doing pretty well with it, I think, though the suspense is driving Laura nuts. Last night she reaches the end of her rope.

"You haven't heard from them??!! I'm going to call them and pretend I am you."

"No, La," I tell her. "We're supposed to wait. I'm on the waiting list."

"But this is ridiculous! You've cleared a whole week and you have no idea if you're going to be able to go."

"But it's kind of interesting," I try. "It's like those trips where people aren't told where they're going until they get there."

"This is ridiculous," she mutters.

I start to itch, like you do when you see someone else scratching. I kind of would like to know where I'm pitching my tent next week. I'm up for the retreat, but I'd also like a week of writing. I've been imagining both with equal interest and anticipation. Which will it be? And what if I could choose? So often I don't choose.

So last night I write to the retreat center. "Uncle!" I say. "Please take my name off the waiting list for the retreat which begins any second now. I fold. I am not Zen enough to wait any longer."

Actually, no. I don't say that. I do say Uncle, though, and then after I send the email I worry that they won't understand that. I'm afraid they'll think I'm addressing them using the Chinese term of filial piety. (This reminds me of how my beloved brother Lee once advised us younger siblings as we entered a large party of mostly Chinese adults: "Don't worry. Just call the men 'uncle' and the women 'auntie' and you'll be okay.")

So I lost the game of chicken. And now the world is my oyster!

I hate oysters.

Laura and I begin to scramble to find the right thing to Occupy me next week.

I don't want to stay at home, as much as I love home. Give me a totally unscheduled week at 15 Main Street and I will spend it oiling squeaky doors, taking out the recycling one yogurt container at a time, checking out The Messiah flash mobs on YouTube, and cooking for the masses.

"Don't stay here," says Laura wisely. "You'll end up buying a dishwasher."

I start looking at B&Bs within walking distance of grocery stores. Laura is looking at yoga retreat centers in Puerto Rico, beach rentals in Florida, a small island off the coast of Brazil. When I look up from my computer, pondering a B&B run by Fred and Ethel and their three dogs, Laura is on her computer looking at Club Meds. Club Meds, she's looking at!

"It doesn't cost anything to look," she says without batting an eye.

"La," I tell her firmly. "I am not going to tell my clients that instead of the meditation retreat I went to a Club Med. I won't be able to face them."

Here my mind gets stuck on how it is that Laura loves me better than I love her. Not more; just better. If I break something, if I leave the oven on, if I screw up somehow, we all agree that it's a good thing it was me and not Laura. We laugh about it, but deep inside I hate how true that is.

If Laura had a week to play with, I would try to make it seem like a fabulous idea to do it on the cheap. Hey! How about you go stay with your mom? It's so comfy there. Or: how about you curl up near this cute, little, shedding Christmas tree we picked up at Lowe's? You could sit right in front of a warm fire. I would dig up lots of reasons not to go whole oyster, while hoping it sounds like her happiness is my top priority.

I have so much to learn about being a good person.

I am leaving Sunday morning and will write more from the retreat I have chosen.

november 30 2009

A year ago yesterday my breasts were sliced off and carried to a lab without me. I still miss them, miss the nerve endings that enveloped them. Not so much for the fun reasons you might be thinking of, though those fun reasons would be frosting on the (cup)cake(s). I just miss being able to feel anything at all in my chest. I miss having breasts as a visible identifier of membership in the female gang.

Last night Laura told me stories about the hours around the surgery -- she reminded me of the huge inflatable warmer they cover you with before surgery. Warm air is pumped through this body-shaped balloon and in the last moments before going under you look down the length of your body to see Dolly Parton's buxom outline. The balloon blanket warmed me up, but my mind made the shape meaningful in ways that weren't comforting.

In the recovery room, I apparently was pretty upset. I didn't know this part. I was crying a lot, saying over and over again that I was scared. Laura says I alternated between wailing and saying hello to my family as chipperly as I could: "How's everyone doing?" then "Waah! I'm so scared!"

The nurse was nodding slowly as she mouthed to Laura "NORMAL. This is perfectly normal."

A volunteer was doing Reiki over my bandaged chest. Laura thought she seemed to be faking it.

I've got a client whose mom is about to have her third surgery to finalize the shape of her prosthetic breasts. Her incisions got infected after her mastectomies, and then she got another infection when they put in the tissue expanders, inserted to stretch out her skin to make room for the silicone implants. It is hard for me to absorb needing the illusion of breasts so much that you'd put your body through all that, especially after it has dealt with cancer. It seems like whipping a horse after a long race.

And yet I do miss having breasts. I don't want to want fake ones, but I envy those who get them without this likely-to-be-chronic ambivalence I carry.

For me, hearing about other people and their prosthetic breasts is like watching people heading out to a very fancy dress ball. I feel left out and somehow less than, but I also know I wouldn't feel comfortable if I tagged along, no matter how fancy my get-up.

The past year has been packed with tired horses, hungry wolves, existential sudoku, footy pajamas under a fancy skirt, and nothing, ever again, beneath my shirt. It's also been full of baby giraffes, snowy owls, noble gladiators, and the miracle of a body healing as much as it can.

I think it's been a good year.