R, a friend who is committed in a very serious way to the silent meditation retreats at Insight Meditation Society's center in Massachusetts, came to visit "Lives of Contemplation" today, and led a wonderfully rich and suggestive discussion about the idea and practice of retreats more generally. (We learned to understand Yom Kippur, where one stages one's own death, as a retreat, too.) IMS is where I went for my one nine-day Buddhist retreat - I remember it so vividly I can't quit believe that was ten years ago.
I was astonished, and in a way grateful, to hear R describe a disconcerting experience I had had - finding that I'd fashioned a life story for each of my fellow meditators, unfettered by any actual exchanges or even eye contact, which was shattered when, on the penultimate day, we were permitted to break our silence and speak. But where I found people more, well, prosaic than I'd imagined and longed to return to a silence uncomplicated by their actual lives and personalities, R told of the delightful surprise when a man who had seemed bitter and unkind turned out to have the warmest smile.
And that triggered a memory I'd lost, for I, too, had been confounded and delighted at people's smiles, having only seen (half-seen!) their expressionless faces for so long - faces I then recognized had been at a kind of rest our ordinary lives barely permit. On the other hand I think I'm also remembering a strongly physical awareness that my own smile muscles were working for the first time in a long time, a little rusty! I wonder why I forgot those charmed discoveries, remembering only my misanthropy? Perhaps, like R, I should have returned for another sit.
I was astonished, and in a way grateful, to hear R describe a disconcerting experience I had had - finding that I'd fashioned a life story for each of my fellow meditators, unfettered by any actual exchanges or even eye contact, which was shattered when, on the penultimate day, we were permitted to break our silence and speak. But where I found people more, well, prosaic than I'd imagined and longed to return to a silence uncomplicated by their actual lives and personalities, R told of the delightful surprise when a man who had seemed bitter and unkind turned out to have the warmest smile.
And that triggered a memory I'd lost, for I, too, had been confounded and delighted at people's smiles, having only seen (half-seen!) their expressionless faces for so long - faces I then recognized had been at a kind of rest our ordinary lives barely permit. On the other hand I think I'm also remembering a strongly physical awareness that my own smile muscles were working for the first time in a long time, a little rusty! I wonder why I forgot those charmed discoveries, remembering only my misanthropy? Perhaps, like R, I should have returned for another sit.
