My week was full of noise and chatter, from outside, from within. In such environs, the craving for solace is immense. Comfort is scarce, the world full of rough edges and no place to sit down.
After many full days of single parenting, respite arrived. I took to the hills. I drove to a national state park in Wisconsin with the intention of reattaching my head and reassembling my mind, whose marbles had been scattered far and wide.
I sat on a soft sand beach along a peaceful lake for two hours. In the vast space before me, my thoughts dispersed like gas molecules, slowing and cooling and never bumping into one another.
I hiked along a trail coated with soft pine needles and wound my way up the stony cliff to a bluff overlooking the lake. With my back against an inviting boulder, I watched the sun set on the hills, lighting up the water all the way down. My companion was a mighty pine leaning out across the chasm, hanging onto the edge of the cliff with a single massive root thicker than its trunk. What brawn!
Yet, between this rock and hard place, I found relief. Many hours of utter stillness returned my weary neurons to their original supple state.
The week began again. The return to single parenting was a return to commotion and endless demands, vicarious heartaches, and pressure. I missed my brief retreat and longed for another, but the hours of presence on the hill conferred something greater than transient peace and quiet.
Who is it that needs comfort or rest? When rest is found, who arises intact, ready to continue into the next picture frame?
I have no identity of my own. I am a thought form in the great mind, a facet of some infinite jewel. In the steps from kitchen table to kitchen sink, I find the pine needle trail. In scouring the milk-stained carpet, my soft sand beach. The cries of my little one shine into my world like the setting sun, and the expanse of hours between dinner and bedtime are the ripples in my peaceful lake.
I hang onto the edge with a single massive root, awareness of this eternal moment. I cannot plummet, because I am the rock and the space and the tree within the space and the water below and the sun shining into all of it.
A talk by Pema Chodron:
