My Zen Retreat

Hilary is down in Costa Rica hunting up some rare birds with a few friends, and I’m making use of the free time to participate in my own private retreat.

As luck would have it, my old friend Dave came to town for a family wedding during my week of solitude, and I took him out to lunch at a restaurant in a strip-mall on Highway 55. 

We reminisced about old times a little—high school and college days. We ranted for a few minutes about our current Bloviator in Chief, chatted with our young waitress about her aspirations to become a dental hygienist, and made a stop at the Goodwill out in Minnetonka.

Due to the snow in the ground, I was denied the pleasure of weeding the moss garden in the back yard—the traditional monastery task--so I chose an equally tedious and fulfilling one: spackling over an unsightly stain on the kitchen ceiling that I have been ignoring for quite some time.

The first morning I applied some spackle from a half-empty container I found in the basement. The next morning I sanded it down and applied some more. I could see I wasn’t making much progress, and on the third day I stopped at the hardware store to get some coarser sandpaper. 

While I was downstairs fetching the spackle that first day, it occurred to me that I ought to tidy up the basement and dispose of some useless junk. Such a task takes time; every item needs to be evaluated. But I had time. In the end, I kept all the memorabilia I’d saved from high school; it wasn’t much. I tossed all the term papers I wrote in college but kept the pay stub from the first article I wrote for City Pages—an unsolicited review of a Pat Metheny concert. I threw out several boxes of travel brochures from Europe, Nebraska, New Mexico, and other places, most of them dating to the 1980s and 90s. I also threw out most of the maps we’d collected of various parts of the BWCAW, some of which were old enough to be printed on that old-fashioned crinkly waterproof paper. Jigsaw puzzles? Out. An old Jeopardy game? Out. Anything smelling of mildew? Out.

During my retreat I kept to simple meals. To maintain the Asian vibe I made my way through a big bag of yellow curry Thai potato chips from Trader Joe’s, accompanied by kale coleslaw from a bag. Pickled herring and Jarlsberg cheese on Wasabröt added a Scandinavian touch.

As mid-afternoon rolled around, I was usually ready for a stroll along one of our favorite routes. We call it “the pines,” because it takes us past a grove of pines halfway along the parkway—very Zen-like.

You might imagine that in the midst of this toil I would take a break to read a few lines from a classic like The Seven Pillars of Zen or Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, but I’m beyond all that. You know what they say: “Those who teach don’t know, and those who know don’t teach.”

(I don’t know precisely who said that, but you’ve got to admit, it’s more than a little redundant.)

Yet I didn’t entirely ignore that interior stuff. In fact, I came up with a small library of thought-provoking material that I was confident would drive me to new depths of enlightenment.

A few examples:

1) Julien Marias: Philosophy as Dramatic Theory:      

“Since philosophy is something that ‘has to be done,’ this means that it is not made or finished, but is something “to be made,” a chore or a task, which is to say that we have to make ‘another’ philosophy, different from those that have preceded us.”

2) Withold Gombowitz: Diary

“Knowledge, what ever it is worth, from the most precise mathematics to the darkest suggestions of art, is not to calm the soul but to create a state of vibration and tension in it.”

3) Antonio Machado: Juan de Mairena

“To think is to meander from highway to byway, and from byway into alleyway, till we come to a dead end. Stopped dead in our alley, we think what a feat it would be to get out. That is when we look for the gate to the meadows beyond.”

4) Fernando Pessoa: The Book of Disquiet

“Morning, spring, hope—they are all connected in music by the same melodic intention; they are connected in our souls by the same memory with the same intention. No: if I observe myself as I observe the city, I recognize that what I have to hope is for this day to end, as all days do. Reason can also see the dawn.”

What? Come again?

After a day or two, such ruminations were beginning to get me down, and one evening I turned on the TV to watch a documentary about Gobekli Tepe, an archeological site in Turkey that’s upending our understanding of the development of agriculture, and cities. As usual with such shows, an hour of footage was devoted to about ten minutes of information, but the scenes of stone walls and rubble, vast rolling hills, and youthful archeologists with heavy German accents scratching at chunks of rock with tiny brushes, somehow held my interest. I also enjoyed those electronically generated SHOCK chords that resounded as each new tidbit of speculation was unveiled.

Eager to learn more, I hunted down my copy of The Dawn of Everything, picking up the argument where I’d dropped it months or even years ago. Among other nuggets of information I came upon, the iconoclastic authors politely report that the so-called “agricultural revolution” took place over a span of about three thousand years, which is roughly equivalent to the interval separating us from the Trojan War.

That “revolution” was carried out almost exclusively by women, and it took place largely on mudflats in the section of the Fertile Crescent south of the Tarsus Mountains, the precise locations changing as rainfall and water levels shifted from year to year. The authors suggest it would be more accurate to refer to these pursuits as “gardening” rather than “agriculture.” It was just one activity among many contributing to the complex Neolithic economy.

I thought about that golden era the next day as I concocted my black bean/canned corn/avocado salad, laced with olive oil, salt, and cayenne.

Another means of escape from ponderous thinking lay in games. The morning Wordle was a must, of course, but I also spent a little too much time playing backgammon, using a program I uploaded years ago from a $10 CD I bought at Office Max. Backgammon comes from India, as you probably know. So does Buddhism. I think.

The weekend arrived with cold, leaden skies, and it was with great pleasure that I broke my schedule of meditations to host a game of dominoes with two old friends. (Dominoes can be traced back to twelfth-century China, by the way.) For the special occasion we made short work of a Papa Murphy’s pizza and a bottle of Gigondas, followed by the better part of a tasty Oregon Pinot Noir.

The sunny skies returned the next morning. In fact, the air was so sharp and clear that by 8:15 I was out of the house and on my way up the hill along the “oak” route, which veers north at the parkway and rises to the road following a narrow stretch of deciduous woods. At that point you cross the road and return south along the tree-lined bike path toward the “pines,” with a row of handsome prewar two-story houses lined up in the distance, just across a second sward of parkway grass. It’s a two-mile route, and it occurred to me that it had never looked better. I was reminded that before it became the name of a deity, the word Zeus referred simply to a quality—brilliance.  

Another remarkable aspect of my retreat was the nightlife. A few days in, I was awakened by the hoot of a barred owl, loud and close. It was dark—just before dawn—but as I looked out the bedroom window, I could see him on a branch maybe 25 feet away. Then the male flew in and landed on the same branch. I know it was a male because a clumsy, fluttering, airborne mating event ensued almost immediately. Five seconds later, the male was gone.

A few nights later the couple was back, this time delivering raucous shouts and trills and monkey laughs. It was 2:32 in the morning, and they seemed to be having a blast.

As my immersive meditative journey grew more intense, I finally came up for air, finding a few hours of relief in a not-entirely-lighthearted film called One Battle After Another.

By this time the remains of the black bean salad in the fridge were getting soggy—especially the avocado. I didn’t want to eat them, but I didn’t have the heart to toss them. So with a continuing emphasis on frugality, I took a small Tupperware container of old rice from the fridge and a half-empty bag of frozen “roasting vegetables” from the freezer. I spread the vegies out on a roasting pan and slid the mélange into the oven. When they were done roasting, I mixed them with the rice, added one tablespoon of fish sauce, one tablespoon or hoisin sauce, and a few splashes of siracha, and heated the concoction in the microwave.

It didn’t taste quite like anything I’d ever eaten before. I’m not saying it was bad ...

Hilary and I talked on the phone every night. She told me tales of fording mountain streams to reach jungle resorts, wonderful lunches in toney art museums, hot ocean beaches and cool swimming pools, rare birds perched on almost every branch, and, more important than anything else, simply having fun with her friends.

She’ll be flying home tonight.

This morning I took walk up to "the oaks." Most of the snow has melted along the parkway, and the air now smells earthier.

In my lackadaisical perusal of The Dawn of Everything, I’ve gotten only as far as the rise of Uruk, which flourished from roughly 4000 to 3100 BCE. But that will have to wait. I’ve got some tidying up to do. And a trip to Trader Joe’s is definitely in the cards. For flowers, of course. The flight doesn't arrive until 8:45. I'm wondering what kind of late-evening snacks would be appropriate?