Mountain time

It’s 7:10 am on a Sunday, and I shouldn’t be awake.

I’m up at the mountain house for a virtual retreat with one of my favorite meditation teachers, Jeff Warren. Our morning session doesn’t start until 9.

There are no kids, no husband, no dogs here. The only sounds right now are my fingers on the keyboard, and birds in the trees. Even the rooster across the valley seems to still be sleeping.

My point being, there’s nothing here that should have woken me up. Except myself, of course.

At 6:15.

Fuck my internal alarm clock.

I’ve been up here since Friday evening, and it’s been nothing less than wonderful. (Which is different than happy, although I’m still struggling to define what that really means.)

I cherish time alone with the reverence and awe of a diamond (an ethically sourced one, of course): rare, beautiful, sparkling, multifaceted. Time alone in the mountains is even more precious to me. Even if I don’t step foot outside (which I didn’t yesterday), just being here, sitting in my bed, watching the early morning fog drift through the valley, falling asleep to the cicadas at night…it’s magic for my soul.

I’ve come up here for virtual retreats before. They’re cheaper than going to the actual retreat center, because I don’t have to pay room and board, and the tuition itself is usually reduced for folks who only show up as rectangles on a screen. I figure that we’re already paying our mortgage on this house, so why not roll a few solo weekends into the deal?

I enjoy our family time here, too, but those visits are more of an extension of my everyday life, just in a different setting. The kids still fight with each other, we still have to coerce them to eat whatever dinner we’ve made, my husband and I still play our roles in whatever part of our relationship dance we happen to be in at the time.

I’ve actually noticed the absence of my dog this weekend more than the absence of the other humans I live with (sorry, not sorry?). I keep looking for her in the bed at the corner of our room, and then remembering “Oh yeah, she’s back at home.” Maybe it’s because we usually go on long hikes together up here. And without her, I haven’t left the house since I got here on Friday. I think I already mentioned that, right?

This retreat has been wonderful so far, even though the host campus lost power last night and all of us internet folks were cut off from the session. I wasn’t angry or upset about it, though. We’d been practicing equanimity earlier in the day, so it was a great opportunity to put that skill into action. So what if we weren’t able to join the rest of the group? It is what it is. (Gah, I sound like my mom, who is the least equanimous person in the world. WTF?)

While I wasn’t resentful or even envious of the folks who were there in person (which honestly surprised me), I did notice a little bit of restlessness seeping in after one of the admins informed us that a power line had gone down in the nearby lake, and that they didn’t expect it to be repaired for another few hours, which meant that we’d miss all of the afternoon practice.

This is where I pictured Sonic the Hedgehog standing with his arms folded, tapping one foot impatiently, one eyebrow raised, teasing the player at the other end of the controller as if to say “So whatcha gonna do now, huh?” (IYKYK)

The restlessness came from a shift in expectations. I had expected to be meditating in the virtual presence of other like-minded folks for those few hours—learning, sharing, exploring the recesses of my mind. Now I was left to my own devices. I could have put on real pants, driven 20 minutes into town, and wandered around there for a while. It was the pants part that was the most unappealing, so I stayed put. I tried to watch to another pre-recorded workshop from another meditation teacher I enjoy, but had trouble focusing. I moved from the couch to the bed, started a new book, decided I didn’t want to read it, and called my mom instead.

Half-an-hour down! But it’s only 4:30. Shit.

What else was there?

There’s an episode of Mayim Bialik’s podcast I’d been meaning to catch up on, so I fired that up on YouTube and treated myself to watching it rather than just listening, and I have to say it was delightful. I am not a “watching” person in genera;, so this was a big deal. When my husband’s out of town for work, I don’t even touch the TV remote. He relaxes with movies and shows. I much prefer books, or podcasts, or shopping on JCrew.com for things I won’t actually buy.

Anyway, I watched the podcast. I called my mom. I downloaded and started another book. I scrolled on IG for a bit. I FaceTimed with my daughter to order the rest of the school supplies she finally realized she needed three days before school starts. I made myself dinner—an asian spiced, seared tuna steak, one of my favorite things to cook when no one else is around, because no one else in my family likes fish. It’s the little things, you know?

At 6:53pm, I logged back onto our Zoom, hoping that the power at campus had been restored so we could have our 7pm Q&A session with Jeff. He’d set aside this time specifically to connect with us online folks, and I was so looking forward to it. Small group discussions are some of the most wonderful, rich, connective parts of any retreat experience. For me, they’re what help the practice sink in the most, so I was beyond delighted when I saw Jeff coming to us from his cabin. I was the only one who had my camera on at that point, so we talked, just the two of us, for a few short minutes.

When I was younger (you know, like 5 years ago), I would have been scared out of my mind to be in a 1:1 conversation with someone I admired. I would have fumbled over words, felt a surge of anxiety, not had any idea what to say. I would have questioned whether I was worthy of talking to him. Actually, I probably wouldn’t have even had my camera on, because I would have been preemptively afraid of even putting myself into a situation like that. But last night, I said hi. I asked him about the power situation on campus. He asked where I was joining from, and I showed him the mountains outside my bedroom window. And as other folks started trickling in, turning on their cameras, unmuting themselves, our conversation widened to embrace everyone. I sat back and listened, and soaked in the sense of community in that Zoom room that defied all logic. We were 22 people in our own homes, our own spaces, never having met each other before. And yet somehow, through the shared pursuit of learning and growth and spirituality, we were intimately connected.

It’s 8:05am now. I’ve been writing for an hour. It hasn’t felt like that long.

As I sit here, still in my bed, my now lukewarm cup of coffee next to me, I’m still glowing from yesterday. I’m eager for our next session to start at 9. But I’m also feeling a twinge of sadness that the retreat will end in a few short hours. That once we’ve completed our morning session—once we meditate together a few more times, soak in more wisdom, express our gratitude for this experience, say our goodbyes, and click that little red “leave meeting” button—I have to go back to my normal, everyday life. I have to leave this quiet, these mountains, this solitude that is so precious to me. I recognize that a big part of the reason these weekends are so special is because they’re rare, like those ethically-sourced diamonds, and that if I lived like this every day, the aloneness might lose its luster.

Still, I always try to carry some of the tranquility and enlightenment of my mountain time home with me. I’ve never been good at keeping it, though, at least not for more than a few days.

We’ll see how it goes this time around.

I don’t know if I’ll step back into my house later this afternoon and immediately feel the stress of needing to clean, needing to prep the kids for school, trying to prep myself for the workweek ahead, deciding what to make for dinner, arguing with the kids about their bedtimes.

If I can manage to bring some of the peace I’ve enjoyed this weekend home with me, there’s the very real possibility that my easygoingness will come off as offensive to my husband. That he’ll be resentful for the calm I’m feeling, since he’s been home with the kids alone all weekend.

I’m debating about asking him for what I need.

“Hun, when I get home later, can you help me extend the experience a little longer? Can you ask me how the retreat was, what we did, what I learned? Can you tell me that you’re glad I was able to take this time for myself, and you were happy to stay home with the kids, because I am worthy and deserving of the space to meditate? Can you try to be curious? Can you open yourself to being being in this more relaxed state with me, to meet me here, so that I can share some of it with you?”

I might.

I might not.

I should.

There’s no such thing as should.

There’s only what is.