Discussions with the Pale

I’m back from a refreshing week at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. There was much meditating, much napping, and much ingestion of delectable vegetarian fare.

Hammett was very happy to see me when I returned, but also relaxed and cheerful, so I think the cat care lady did a good job, though she does seem to be a tad forgetful, in that when she came over to meet Hammett and get the key, I told her my living room was a shoe-free zone, but before the end of her brief visit, she walked into the living room in her shoes.

The day before I left for my retreat, I heard what sounded like someone bumping against the outside of my apartment. Then I heard someone fumbling at the door, a key turning in the lock. “Interesting,” I thought, and stood near the door to see who was going to come in. It proved to be the cat care lady, one day early.

So then I was slightly worried she would space out and open a window while I was gone or something, but she didn’t.

The night before I left, I got together with Susan B., who was visiting from Vancouver, and Nell, who lives here. I hadn’t seen either of them in a million years (certainly ten years or so) and we had a really nice time. We went to El Toro for burritos and as we were waiting to pay the cashier, a street person, black, apparently male-to-female transgender and with a line of snot running down her upper lip, approached us to make some sort of a deal: “If you have a five-dollar bill, I have four dollars and seventy-five cents.”

One of El Toro’s employees walked up to ask her to leave, probably for the millionth time, and she snapped at him, “I’m talking to a white person!”, which made everyone within earshot smile.

Kind-hearted Nell stepped outside with the woman to negotiate, but it turned out that the four dollars and seventy-five cents was not literally available; when it came right down to it, it was more of a request for the five-dollar bill, period.

Meanwhile, Susan asked in confusion, “Wasn’t there just a tip jar here?” At this, the cashier silently brought it from its hiding place, eliciting more understanding smiles.

I have been on this particular retreat three times. It focuses on samadhi: concentration. It’s offered only once a year, amid about a million vipassana retreats, where the aim is insight. Two years ago, we were warned to be careful in our communications once we were back at home, as we might find ourselves being harsher than intended, with all the concentration we’d built up fueling whatever we might say. Sure enough, just a couple of days later, I mortally offended a coworker without having meant to.

However, last year’s homecoming was smooth and peaceful, so I wasn’t expecting problems this year, but it has actually proved to be extremely rocky. I returned home Thursday about noon, went to work on Friday, and was about one inch from quitting my job by the end of Friday. My goal for the weekend was not to think about my job at all, which I did not succeed in.

On Saturday, I saw After the Wedding, a Danish film featuring the exquisite Mads Mikkelsen, whom we saw in Casino Royale, playing Le Chiffre. In After the Wedding, he plays a Scandinavian aid worker in India—he cares for orphans—who is obliged to travel to Denmark to accept a large monetary gift to his charity. This he is not exactly eager to do; he arrives in a barely civil mood, despite what hangs in the balance. He attends the wedding of his benefactor’s daughter and surprises ensue. Recommended.

In the bathroom after the movie, I was thinking about one of the teachers at the retreat, Pascal Auclair, who was very charming. He is French and speaks in heavily accented English, stopping now and then to seek a word. In a talk he gave, he spoke briefly about passive effort versus active effort. For instance, if you are studying beavers in the passive investigation mode, you “don’t mess with the beavers. You hide in the bush and you look with your binoculars and you say, ‘Huh! Lookit that!’”

Another time, he said, “I would like to support your efforts, and to make sure I do support your efforts, I am going to speak in English.”

At the end of the retreat, he advised not making any big decisions for one week, such as “belly or nostril?” Twenty seconds after I got done thinking about him saying that, I walked out of the bathroom and smack into one of the women who had been on the retreat! (There were 84 retreatants, all told; people come from all over, including other countries, to go to Spirit Rock, though I don’t know if we had any international visitors on this retreat.) “My god, I can’t believe it,” I said.

We walked to Market St. together and had a very nice chat.