I wake slowly and fitfully in what I sense is the middle of the night, in an unfamiliar, semi-dark, silent room. I toss and turn in the warm bed until I feel the need to pee, then roll onto my right side to get up. If I were at home, I would open my eyes to the digital clock on the bedside table—but I’m not at home. I’m on a week-long solitary retreat in an Airbnb in central Maine.
The retreat is part of my spiritual theme for 2023: Stillness, Silence, and Solitude. I was drawn to those words at the end of 2022—drawn by a deep longing for those states themselves, and for the transformation they might cause within me if I were to embrace them. Once this visceral yearning rose to consciousness, my practical nature kicked in, and I began looking for a place to be alone. I searched Airbnb and VRBO and ended up with a cozy apartment in a small town about half an hour—and a world—away from home.
No familiar glowing red numbers orient me in the dead of this night, so I make a deliberate effort to determine the time. I reach for my iPhone. 1:01 a.m. At the same moment, I catch a glimpse of an email notification that arrived after I turned out the light at about 9:30. It says:
“I completely agree with Daisy’s approach….”
Suddenly, I am wide awake. Why does this sentence jolt me so fully into consciousness? Because I disagree with Daisy’s approach—or at least, yesterday I had the uneasy feeling that it was naïve, lazy, or even a cop-out. Now my mind is engaged, and experience has taught me that the likelihood of falling back asleep is slim to none.
So I get up to pee, stewing mildly about Daisy’s approach and everyone’s easy acceptance of it, then return to bed and pull the warm covers over my chilled body. I lie there for a while, breathing deeply and saying to myself, Let it go, let it go, over and over, in rhythm with my breath. The stillness of my body and the measured breathing are soothing, and I almost believe I will slip back into sleep. Though my body is calm, my alert mind witnesses my feelings about Daisy’s approach and the emailer’s response, weighing my options for responding—or not.
Finally, I decide to see this early-morning waking as an opportunity rather than a dreary inconvenience—to view Daisy’s approach not as a problem to be solved, but as a stimulus for exploring my spiritual theme in the first hours of this new day. I get up, put on my long johns and warmest wool sweater, and boil water for tea. I intend to meditate first, then write.
After an hour of silent sitting meditation, reading, and journalling—unexceptional, much like my usual start to the day—I feel the urge to write an essay about where I am and why. I record the first moments of this day, an exercise in orienting myself to the here and now. Then I broaden my field of awareness to the larger context of this small Maine town.
As we drove in, it appeared extremely conservative. “How did you know that?” someone asked me later. I answered by pointing to the many American flags displayed everywhere, several with black-and-white stripes and a few bearing the “thin blue line” that often signals support for the police and opposition to Black Lives Matter. There were almost no cars. Pickup trucks sped past me on my walks with the dog. All of this, in my liberal mind, added up to conservatism—perhaps even of the radical sort.
And yet, while self-consciously practicing open-mindedness—and briefly abandoning my pursuit of silence and solitude—I paused to speak with a few locals during my walks. A young fireman at a nearby station waved at me. Thinking we might have something in common, since my family includes a couple of firefighters, I approached him to chat. I began by saying I was a stranger. He told me, among other things, that he was new to town as well and found the people friendly and welcoming. I felt a fresh breeze move through my mind.
Early in the week, I went to the corner store in search of a vegetable peeler. They didn’t have one for sale and directed me to another shop, a ten-minute walk away. As I headed up the road, I heard a shout behind me: “Hey, lady!” I turned to see the young woman from the store waving a vegetable peeler.
“You can have this one,” she said. “We don’t use it anyway.”
“I’ll bring it right back after I peel the sweet potatoes,” I replied.
“No—keep it. Leave it in the B&B for the next occupant.”
We wished each other a nice day, and I continued on my way, struck by her generosity. Nothing, it seems, is as unambiguous as it first appears. I am as guilty of stereotyping as the next person—quick to jump to conclusions based on first impressions, preconceived ideas, and unexamined prejudices.
But the title of this essay is Stillness, Silence, and Solitude. So, I pause my typing to ask myself: what do these insights have to do with those three words? Immediately, it occurs to me that I might not have arrived at these understandings without the space to reflect that stillness, silence, and solitude are providing.
My aim in seeking this trinity of s’s is to encounter my authentic self. Who am I when I am not doing, talking, or relating? I have spent most of my life engaged in activity and conversation. We all have. I wonder who I might be if I sat still, stopped talking, and lived alone. There is a rich spiritual heritage of solitaries who withdrew to caves and deserts—Jesus among them, at least briefly—to face themselves and seek meaning and purpose. Could I place myself, from time to time, in that lineage to do the same, and to better understand what motivates me, why I react as I do, and whether I might want to change some ingrained patterns?
Five days into this experiment, I ask myself: what am I discovering?
To be continued tomorrow
With All Due Respect 