Retreat Day 2

Mar. 2: After a good night’s sleep, I began with a guided meditation on starting the day with happiness. Seven affirmations included this first one, to “plan but remain flexible.” My foot is still hurting a little, and my headache continues to come and go as it has for the past week. Other than that, I have enjoyed tea and breakfast and the quiet of a Saturday morning. A Sudafed helped my head, so I’m still convinced it’s a sinus/allergy problem.

Finished Henri Nouwen’s The Way of the Heart. He teaches that the way to pray without ceasing is to use a simple word or phrase, to use it continually, and to make it encompass all that is. For me at the moment the words are Health and Wholeness, Grace and Peace, prayed rhythmically with my breath. I can pray that for everything and everyone in the cosmos.

Krista Tippett, in her podcast On Being, interviewed Pico Iyer, a travel writer who makes his home in rural Kyoto, “commuting” 5 feet to his desk for 5 hours, then taking a walk, reading for an hour, taking another walk, and spending the evening with his wife. They live in the same 2-room apartment where they also raised two kids.

Every season Mr. Iyer goes to a Buddhist monastery where silence is a way of life. He travels for work, but he sits for insights about all he has seen. I watched his TED Talk on the Art of Stillness. He recommends that each of us devote a few minutes to stillness every day; a few days every season; or even, (as Leonard Cohen did for 5 years at Mt. Baldy Zen Center in California) a few years of your life. Now I’m going out for a walk to empty my head of all those words. They need time to sink in.

Mostly silence or Estelle Frankel this evening.