I leave for Rio early Friday evening. This will make for a grand total of something like 12 flights in 2 months. I will be so very glad to leave airports alone for a few months at least! Travel only keeps on getting worse; there's going to come a day when I'll be booking passage on a boat...
The reason for such a poorly updated blog month is that I spent much of it traveling. These last ten days were spent at the WMF staff retreat, held in swinging Nebraska City, Nebraska. Swinging, that is, if you like trees. All that green was relaxing: my hideous back pain issues melted away after a few nights in the hot tub...
The best part about these retreats is the family-reunion feel, as we reconnect with friends we haven't seen in three years, marvel at how the kids have grown up, and then settle down to late nights after the sessions, sharing our loves and woes and laughter and tears over a couple of beers or a tall class of...chocolate milk. (Not together, of course!) The worst part: the lack of sleep. It seems somehow traitorous not to stay awake as much as possible, to squeeze every drop of life out of these ten days. Because once they're gone...it'll be another three years. I, unfortunately, came drained, and could have used a full week of sleep in that giant queen-sized bed to catch up!
Our sessions were on contemplation, prayer, and spending time in God's presence. For an ADD procrastinator who worries too much and can't ever get her brain off of memory-scanning mode, sitting silently with God for even five minutes was supremely challenging. Our first scheduled "quiet time" I spent screaming in my head, as the many voices within me writhed in agony at their forced silence. No planning, no lists, no thinking about what's happening next, or what someone said...no rabbit trails off into the dark forests of my mind, no imaginative flights into other worlds...
I am not a Zen person. I wouldn't consider myself contemplative. But it is so absurdly difficult for me that I have come to believe it is essential. I watch people I know become less and less connected to the world as they retreat ever more deeply into their unstoppable lives. The more there is to do, the less time to breathe, to see beauty, to enjoy pleasure and say "it is good." They, I, become so busy there is no time for other people, not really. There is just too much to "do."
That's not the person I want to become. I'm tired of doing. It makes me feel fractured and split into hundreds of incompatible pieces, each vying for a space to have a say in my brain, each one trying to convince me that their particular place is my life is the most the VERY most important. And they aren't. The most important is now. Because the present is all I have. And if I can't enjoy it because I'm locked into wishful thinking about the past, or stressed about the future, then I'm not really living, am I? Nor am I really following at all the teachings of Jesus, who told people not to worry about the future because (so optimistically!) the present already had enough problems of its own.
So, all that to say...the retreat was good, I'll try to post some pictures, and I have a Word document some two pages long full of blog posting ideas. So if I'm not writing here, it's because I'm procrastinating, and feel free to write me hate mail until I cave in and chain myself to the computer!
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