Part 6: Silent Meditation Retreat: Bad Words, Wild Laughter and the End of the Retreat

Too soon it was time for the last sits of the morning, the last dharma talk. Victor added a caveat to the Saturday talk, saying if you have been on the path for a long time, as a mature long time Buddhist practitioner, in the hands of a skillful teacher, then you will understand the teaching, "It's just a thought!" and it will be useful to you.  But if you are a child, the words will not comfort you, they will do you no good ... I thought of my symbolic peacock magically changing my mood and I felt very young, sure these words were directed at me. I felt like a fraud to be at the retreat at all, as though I had wandered into an adults only event scribbling blue crayon on the walls, some place where I had no business to be. 

At the same time, there was a faint lightening of the heart. A relief: I didn't know why, I needed to chew on it, but suddenly we're sitting in the Talking Circle, it's happening so fast, and I'm sad that it is over. The retreat is over. We can speak! So I speak because I can and don't say anything that matters. I don't even remember to thank Victor for his teachings and Tricia for her kindness and her care. (Tricia broke Noble Silence to go off property to the supermarket down the road to buy aspirin for my poor knees on Saturday night. And I forgot to thank her publicly).  Instead, I keep the spotlight on me, I make people laugh. I'm back in the business of Alison as usual. So much for Right Speech. 

But to redress the balance of the earlier terrible grief, I need to make myself laugh. This is instinctive and I don't fully understand it at the time. It happens within an hour of finding our words again.

Tran, Victor and I head to lunch together. I bound up the steps to the cafeteria two at a time. 

Victor asks, "What's with this going up the steps two at a time?" 

I say, "I've been dying to do that! I'm letting my inner child out." 

Victor turns to Tran, "'Letting her inner child out' - she IS her inner child." 

Tran says to me, "I've been thinking a lot about this. I think you are 65 % child, 5 % adult and 30 % wise woman."  

As one part of me is aghast-  65% - so the child within is rejoicing. Now she is rising from the ashes of her dark night. Now she lives again. 

Victor asks Tran, "And what do you think you are?" 

"I'm not sure," she says. "65% too?" 

"Oh, I wouldn't say that much," says Victor. 

At which point I - 100% child and irrepressible, triumphant, alive - shout, "HEY!!! I'm twice her age - she can't be less than me! F**k!!" just as we turn the corner  into the cafeteria - and three tables of women look up from their lunch in startled silence...

Victor says quietly, "Did she say a bad word?" (Tran and I can't speak) and mildly, "Alison, you're not setting a very good example for Long Beach Meditation, representing us just coming out of a silent retreat." 

Of course Tran and I are on the floor laughing.

Things deteriorated further over lunch (mercifully, they put us on the patio, out of earshot of those serious others). Wendy inquires brightly, "What does 'pudding' mean in England? I'm reading a book and they're always talking about pudding." Tricia pipes up helpfully with something about Yorkshire puddings. And I am overcome by the character my daughter Helen calls her 12 year old brother, and announce that there is a sweet pudding called... Spotted Dick! And then the child falls under the table in gales of laughter. Giddy with relief. Not abandoned. Not banished. Not dead. 

Balance was restored. I needed to laugh - I had cried so much. Victor would ask, "Who needed to laugh? Who had cried?"  The child, of course. The laughter - and especially the juvenile nature of that laughter - was a clue that this was a child come roaring back from the dead. From the place to which she has long been condemned, whenever she is shoved back into the past without a voice. It was the mad laughter experienced after a brush with death, on top of which the Mary and Joseph Retreat Center was so much like my old Catholic heap of a boarding school. It could only be words like "f**k" and "spotted dick", (which is the unfortunate name of a real pudding, by the way) from the mouth of the child, that would reassure her that she had not been annihilated.  Reprieve!  Reprieve! That was the feeling, though it didn't make sense until much much later. At the time, I just thought the terrible grief earlier in the day had been redressed by the gleeful schoolgirl: tears and laughter, life and death, and so the journey continues.