Blast from the Past 02-Retreating 2013

It is a clear indication that the protective facade that one uses in everyday life has deteriorated when the fears, anxieties, and doubts slap one soundly across the face, especially while meditating in a monastic church balcony prior to evening services. This is the part of “retreating” that I always dread, outside the ooey-gooey, sweetness and light, spiritually uplifting stuff that everyone thinks of when they think of spiritually absenting themselves from the material world.

I reacted in my usual stoic manner, suppressing the urge to run into the woods screaming until I collapsed under the weight of my own weight and the weightier matters weighing me down. Or maybe it was abject fear, rather than macho stoicism that left me nailed to the floor. In time I lifted my leaden feet and made my way back to my hide-out.

Perhaps I stared at the moon too long last night. After Compline, I looked up and saw half a circle of light mooning me in the sky. For some reason, I was fascinated. Admittedly, I don’t see much of the moon these days: working into the wee hours and up in the same wee hours, waving at our lunar companion in passing. On this night, my gaze was fixed on the old orb as if moon madness had struck me, and in those several minutes that I exchanged glances with the moon man, I felt a sense of my own insignificance. I saw myself as a speck on a speck of a planet in little backwater solar system, in an unregarded part of an insignificant galaxy in a vast universe of infinite such systems and beings all looking up and never seeing beyond.

So as I was sitting on the edge of my well-used bed wondering why I had to travel so far and spend so much cash to feel lousy, when I was certain I could do it much more economically at home—as I was sitting there on the edge of feeling sorry for myself, I began to wonder where my cell phone was. I hadn’t seen it in some time.

I began what I like to call an avalanche search, where one casually begins to pick over things looking under and over with relative unconcern until it gradually degenerates into a hunting free-for-all with objects flying every which way until the room looks as if it could hide an elephant under the debris. I looked every place several times including all the clothes I had worn and even those I had not. No cell phone found.

Having resigned myself to searching outside in the dark with a flashlight and, as a last resort, reporting it missing, I started out about half an hour before Compline to search for the cell outside the friendly confines of my cell. I reached for my coat to leave and the sweats I had worn earlier started to fall off the door I hung them on. As I caught them in midair, I felt a rectangular object in them, and there was my cell phone, in the pocket of the sweats I had searched in three times.

OK, God, I get it. You have a sense of humor, and you do care about a seemingly insignificant humanoid on an embattled ball of dirt careening through a universe filled to the brim which such objects and peoples. So the darkness is a little brighter and I am going to engage a little more tomorrow in the community. Possibly even Vigils, so I must get to sleep in order to awake with the bells.