envy of a slug
Every few months beginning in May 2005, I have traveled upstate to a Zen monastery to train and see my teacher, but since December 2019, I have been there only once, last July for sesshin, a week long meditation retreat. I arrived just after supper on a Thursday, grabbed some bread and peanut butter from the dining hall, and sat on a picnic bench under the pine trees to eat and weep. The mountains, the garden, the practice in the zendo—everything had gone on without my presence, and I had missed it so. Since spring 2020, it has been possible to practice with the monastery via the internet, and I often do so, but watching the zendo is nothing like being in the zendo, sitting or chanting side by side with others.
In the mornings after breakfast during sesshin, retreatants participate in caretaking practice—washing bathrooms, cleaning and chopping vegetables, polishing brass, etc. I have been asked to do everything from cleaning a car to baking a batch of gluten-free brownies. Last July, I was asked to weed, a task I took up gladly because as a city dweller I don’t have many chances to muck around in the soil. While weeding, I encountered many creatures—earthworms, bugs, and an orange slug that, to my great surprise, I found I envied.
The slug was just a slug, doing its slug thing. Eating dirt? I don’t actually know how slugs occupy themselves, and I’m not going to look it up right now. Whatever it was doing, the slug didn’t care that it was a slug (possibly didn’t even know that it was a slug?) or wish to be anything else or do anything else. The slug was really in it—“it” being life, the dirt, the shade of that sunny July morning.
How I long to be really in it, too. Really in the zendo, when I’m lucky enough actually to be in the zendo again. Or, really in my living room right now, not quite awake though I’ve been up for more than three hours, achy from ice skating yesterday afternoon. If I find it hard to be in it even in the lush wilderness of summer, how much harder it is on a winter day like today, under a gloomy sky and dusting of snow. What’s in it for me to be in it on a day like today? Except that there’s no other day for me to be in. Not today, anyway.
This month for the Ploughshares blog I took up the question of wintering without dissociating as inspired by Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May—who really, really gets in it by swimming in the sea every day in late winter one year. I’m tempted to try it! But I don’t think I’d survive! Nor is it permitted at any of the beaches nearby! So.
Have you ever been cold water swimming? Do tell . . . And, as always, take care!
