Heading up to a cabin in Big Bear for a solo retreat tomorrow and I can’t wait. I know we’re supposed to be excited about the world opening up and all, but I’m pretty ambivalent about it. I miss hugs, don’t get me wrong, I miss hugs real bad, but I don’t miss traffic or drunk douchebags on the street or the lady on her phone in the checkout line or the guy with the boom box on the beach playing shitty metal that you can’t seem to get away from.
After a retreat, the day when you go back to your life – that’s a tough day. And this past year has been it’s own kind of retreat for me, and for many people I know and commune with. We’ve managed to cultivate some real peace during an extraordinarily challenging year. We’ve made time to love on ourselves, time we never felt we had before. We’ve touched down into some sacred, sovereign core that is starting to feel more and more elusive now that we’re all getting back to “normal life”.
I was initially intending this retreat to be a kind of ritualized goodbye to my quarantine self, but no. No no, I don’t want to say goodbye to him. Instead, I think this retreat is gonna be one big beautiful binding spell. I am gonna sit in that cabin and create secret code words and tiny magic gestures for myself, bonding even more strongly with that sacred sovereign core, so that the next time the traffic arrives or the boom box invades, I’ll just twitch a finger and instantly breathe a sigh of relief remembering that I am way WAY too busy making love to myself right now to care.
