Counting Lovers While on Retreat

It’s week two of my three-week solo meditation retreat in a cabin in the woods of Northern California. I am sitting up on the hard single bed drinking my morning tea, surrounded by rivers of rain falling in a steady stream down the windows, across the deck, rain pounding on the tin roof above my head. 

Out of the blue I find myself counting. It begins with houses I had lived in, then films I had made, cars I owned, births, miscarriages, until I arrive at men I had slept with. I get to 50 and can’t take it anymore. I have to stop. Some I can’t remember their names, or where we were, they are just random flickers of memory –– They drove a Volvo station wagon. They had a green couch. There was a maple tree outside their window. I cull out a small collection of men I loved, some who I had slept with and others I hadn’t.  Then another small cluster arises of men I had slept with who years later committed suicide. I count one, two, three and then I remember Philip, a lover from the 1960’s who may or may not have intentionally driven his motorcycle off a mountain road in the late 1970’s.  I remember mentioning Philip in a story I wrote while I lived at Lookout Valley Ranch about an encounter with a cowboy at the Loaf and Jug in a nearby town.  I had a midlife flush of excitement when he nodded in my direction as our paths crossed between the pumps and the convenience store. He was tall with dark hair just skimming the neck of his weathered jean jacket, wearing aviator glasses and he had a 1960’s style bushy moustache just like Philips. Describing the resemblance I wrote that years after I had lost touch with him Philip had “ridden his Harley Davidson off a mountain road he knew like the back of his hand”. 

It would have all ended there but in a strange and inexplicable auspicious coincidence I shared the story in a writing group a few years later and when I finished reading the man sitting to my right in the circle, who I had never seen before (though he looked familiar in the way that old hippies can have a sense of familiarity), said in a quiet yet distinct voice, “Philip Darlington road a Triumph, not a Harley”.  Everything stopped. The room became luminous, groundless, like a space capsule with words spinning, untethered, in the air. There was only the sound of a car passing on the road outside to ground me. It was a moment that seemed to last forever. Then it was over. I have no recollection of what was said after; I never saw the man who knew Philip again, I never even learned his name.

I land back in my cabin, my journey through layers of memories, time traveling from the Loaf and Jug in Florence, Colorado, to years before on a winding dirt road off Four Mile Canyon, fast forwarding to a group sitting in a circle on the floor of a basement apartment in Boulder, comes to an end. The rain is still falling. I am sad and disoriented. The room is cold. What on earth was I thinking doing a retreat in the woods in March? I am too old for this shit. I feel a familiar tug, my mind circling the drain, being pulled down into a sinkhole of old despair. Suddenly one more piece of the story arises. Bill, the poet and old lover leading the writing group in that room in Boulder, years later, committed suicide, setting fire to himself in his car parked in a field next to the gun range a stone’s throw from the trailer where I now live in Boulder.  I start to cry, and the tears fall down my cheeks like the rain coursing down the window pane, tears and rain blurring the trees and mist covered mountains; the layers of memory and loss and sadness and rain blending seamlessly together with no beginning or end.  The crying eases and I take a sip of tea and hold the warm sweetness of it in my mouth.  Something is humming in the back of my mind, waiting to be revealed.

I swing my legs onto the floor slipping my feet into my old worn slippers. It’s suddenly quiet. No rain pounding on my head. A ray of sun blinds me. The trunk of the madrone tree outside the window gleams a deep bronze. I stand and pull a sweater on over my pajamas. What is that song? I look up at the sky, splotches of blue peeking through the fast-moving grey clouds, and I start to sing.  “Let it be… let it be” only it isn’t Mother Mary, it’s Mother Nature who comes to me “speaking words of wisdom.”  Mother Nature is always here, unfazed by our complaints, kind in the face of our despair, telling us again and again to let go. There is so much wisdom in our lives, in our stories, in our bodies, in the natural world that surrounds us, all here to guide us, to open our hearts and ease our minds, telling us to have patience, to listen. To trust. An answer always comes.