In every spiritual group, there is one person no one can stand, but all must strive to pretend to accept this person on a deep level. For myself, at my last retreat, I was turning my cup of wine in my hand slowly as another participant went on and on about how people of all different faiths had helped her, in spite of the fact that her religion and sect was the best.
No one else was voicing such sentiments, and everyone was presumably praying this person would shut the fuck up, but also enjoying a beautiful fire outside, and a drink.
As testimony to my improved mental and spiritual help, this was the only time I wanted someone to shut the fuck up at my retreat.
I’m always nervous to leave. I’m nervous about the contents of my mind when I stop the videos and the podcasts.
Then I get to the monastery. With only books or a guided meditation to chatter for me, I’m always fine. My mind rehydrates and fills the space of my skull again. Like, oh, things are fine. Lots of sisters are still here, praying and reading and teaching and puttering and getting sick and dying, and some day they will all be dead, but you know. It happens.
I had requested to join three spiritual thingies this fall. Then I promptly abandoned one. A friend wanted to have dinner that night, and one thing I have to work on is seeing my friends. The fire hose of video online is a good friend, but it can’t do everything for you.
I had emailed back and forth with a sister about how I had failed to appear at the first thing, and how I wanted to go to the retreat. She was like, we need you to actually show up for this, and this is a lot of scholarship to give to one person, and rather than flying off with the winds of my shame, I agreed I would show up, and it was a lot of scholarship, which was okay because my students then possessed most of my energy and belief in life, and I needed to get more.
I stopped by to drop off my diabetic cat with a family member, and when the cat and I arrived, a cadre of my family were in the middle of hating each other and wondering why everyone had ruined everything for everyone else.
I like to put this in because many times people meet my family, and they’re like, your family is so great, and I want to tell you, they are great, and also we have been known to fight like Italians, though we be northern European stock.
I was like, haha, okay, I’ll be going now, and drove off.
I am frequently late to the monastery the way I am late for most things, and after having the sister draw some healthy boundaries for me about following through, I was feeling good about listening to Conan O’Brien interview Maria Bamford (two people I love), and the idea that in order to feel cared for, I should stop at Starbucks on the way.
Though it be evil to go to Starbucks as they union bust, is it not also a blessing to hold a latte and taste of the lemon loaf? Dost that not nourish?
I pulled off the highway, merry go rounded through rush hour traffic, ordered and got my treats, sat in the car to type something charming on facebook, looked back at my phone directions, and the phone said, YOU WILL BE LATE, and I told my phone, goddamn it.
I drove a bit faster, arriving three minutes late, well within the 5 minute “meaningless” zone, and far from the 10 minute “things happen” or the 15 minute “no one thought you were dead or anything.”
The sisters care for us so well: there were bon-bons and cheeses and crackers and nuts and cookies.
The clay sister is different. Many of the sisters were teachers. They are very verbal, like me, very bookish. The clay sister read us a meditation about creation before we got our hands in clay, and then she just let us go. I had to ask questions. With most of the sisters, they have thought through all possible questions and pre-answer everything. In every building at the monastery there are umbrellas, flashlights, lotions, coffee, creamer, blankets, extra jackets.
I imagined the clay sister didn’t think in words. It’s great for me to be around people like that. Almost everyone I know is so tangled up in their minds we can’t find our own assholes.
We made little thumb-sized pots that she put wicks and oil in for our prayer.
Then we were to make whistles.
“I’ve never had anyone do it successfully,” she said, which I found hilarious and amazing. Here’s your task. You’ll fail. Let’s give it a try.
Except, reader, I didn’t! I made my whistle, a dome with a floor and a mouthpiece, held it to my mouth, and it whistled clear and strong.
Everyone looked over at me as if I were not a person with $50,000 of student loans and no assets.
I blew it a second time, and the whistle was a bit foggier.
I put it down to shape the mouthpiece a little more, and crushed the whistle sound like a World War I soldier crushing a butterfly in a trench.
In a way, this was a relief, because I wasn’t quite comfortable being the only success in a group.
We went to our quarters and slept.
We got up before sunrise because seeing the sunrise was part of the nature touching of this retreat. I had packed clothes for a 50 degree morning, and it turned out to be 34 degrees.
It is a joy to get ready at the monastery, as I do not wear makeup or contacts, and only bring black and grey clothes, so everything matches.
I walked out into the dawn light and got my first hit of cold since last February.
Clay sister had a pan of homemade cinnamon rolls, and we stood around her car waiting for our last participant.
We stood there long enough that we were all actually freezing. I was bouncing to increase my body heat. Our last comrade had gotten sick in the night, and would comrade join us?
Ultimately no, and we climbed into cars.
I knew one person at the retreat from a previous visit. She was also a teacher, and we had had some cathartic conversations about feeling shit on and vivisected at work.
It was nice to see her again.
We drove just a little ways, more for the warmth of the cars than the strain of walking it, and we stopped at one of the spots you can overlook the Missouri River.
The Missouri’s status tells you a lot about how Kansas City, my home town, feels. The Mighty Mississippi (as my stepmom always announced when we crossed it on road trips) goes through St. Louis, and down to New Orleans. It is everything. The Missouri is like, hey, we have a river. It’s all right. Mark Twain didn’t write a fucking great American novel about it, but it’s all right.
The Missouri is my route from Kansas City to Atchison. I drive north, parallel to the river, on either the Missouri or Kansas side. The Missouri side has wineries and the Iatan power plant. The Kansas side has a famous penitentiary, and buffalo. So you can’t go wrong.
We stood in a line on a narrow asphalt road. It was already light, but the sun had not shown his head yet. The river did its thing, one motor boat buzzed by rudely, and then the sun peeked, and I was amazed how quickly it revealed its whole self.
I was expecting to have to be patient, especially because it was cold, and once it was up, we could get back in the warm cars.
I didn’t have to be patient. The cold and my body made peace. I stopped fidgeting and watched, still.
Back at the pottery studio, our assignment was to go out and pick a bunch of nature to press into the clay.
Generally at the monastery, when I get given an assignment, I am an A student. I am 100% ready to go. As I was that morning. I love trees, I love leaves. While my wool beret kept my ears warm (its first outing of the season, ay!), I quickly met leaves I wanted to get to know, none of them yet fully changed, they were still green, or had leopard spots of their fall colors. It’s only been in the last few years I’ve noticed the beginning stageso f fall color, and I find it so funny, leaves getting acne, polka dots, so awkward.
Dew on the leaves was so sparkly I couldn’t believe it. So sparkly! No glitter needed. But this was why they sold you glittered leaves at Michael’s.
I tucked my chosen lovies in the pouch of my hoodie.
Then we had clay. I got white. We had hours to do whatever.
My group was quiet. Clay sister put on a classical CD including the “cartoon wake up music,” as I think of it, and “A Night on Bald Mountain,” which I used to play with the orchestra in high school. That was great.
I thought I’d press a sunflower into clay and make a gift for a friend. That looked stupid, just a lot of dots for no reason. I tried to make a bud vase, because I always need those, but without a wheel, my vase was too big, and hopelessly awkward. No, I’m a 2-D person, art wise. I made three tiles. Inspired by that show where the man and woman renovate their chateau, I also wanted tiles that were personal to my home. After much deliberation, I had named my home “deux chats en haut,” which though charming, will present difficulties should I ever adopt cat “trois.”
I made three tiles with arts and crafts style shapes, and I was in love with them.
I also made a tiny St. Francis, with a cat snuggling around him, and a tiny turtle, ’cause I like that turtles are slow, and I found a flower stamp to cheat for my sunflower friend gift.
After lunch, we glazed. I was worried about exactly how the colors would come out. Clay sister said, “IF you want to know what the colors look like, I can try to show you tiny pictures of them,” and she held up her phone. So I was like, okay, let’s roll the dice.
I spent my last morning sleeping and reading, alternately. I had loved evening prayer with the sisters, always love their chanting, but I needed quiet more.
At lunch the anticipation was dreadful. Every sister asked if you were excited, and you were.
Clay sister revealed to us that nothing had exploded.
We walked back down to the clay studio, and my tiles looked perfect. St. Francis had lost half his head, but the cat was the important thing there.
Before going home, I did a bit of sightseeing.
I told a comrade I didn’t think I’d visit my ancestral graves near Atchison on this visit, but as I started my car, I immediately knew I had to.
IT’s a quick drive. My great-grandparents’ farm is not really in the middle of nowhere. It’s a few miles from a town of 200, and a few miles from a town of 400, and a few miles from a town of 10,000.
I got to Lancaster, Kansas. Saw the cemetery first. There are definitely more dead people than living ones in this town. But it wasn’t depressed. There Methodist church had become a non-denomiational one, which scared me a bit. Someone had an above ground pool. Someone had a gazebo. Some houses were trailers, and others were a bit Victorian. Someone had set up three skeletons in a cheerleader pyramid wearing jerseys.
I started my cemetery search far from the Schurman area. The oldest graves were from the 1870s. The names were German and Scandinavian. It was a Protestant town. The internet believes that the town was named either for Lancaster, Pennsylvania, or Lancaster, Ohio. This made me sad. People are so lazy about naming shit. We have so many words!
I found a great aunt and uncle. They were off by themselves, for whatever reason. Then I found our main patch: my great-grandparents, both of whom I knew pretty well. I was in middle school when they died. I pulled their dandelions, their grass gone to seed, and found that the sod was just sitting on the deeper dirt. IT was dry. I picked a few teeny white and yellow flowers from someone else’s grave (don’t worry, they had plenty left), and set it on theirs. I kissed my hand and pressed it to my great-grandma’s name. I have many female ancestors who didn’t take any shit, and she was one of them. Also she was a teacher, so we have that.
I similarly cleaned up Uncle Dale’s grave. Uncle Dale scared me because he was physically unusual, mentally unusual, and also, I think, cranky. His mental and physical disabilities could have meant he spent his life in an institution, but instead, my great-grandparents took him to Kansas City for leg surgeries that enabled him to walk, and he lived at home most of his life.
I pulled weeds for my other great aunts and uncles. I didn’t really know them, but they knew me. That is, I was presented to them regularly at Christmas gatherings in the church basement, and then I ran off to make movies with my Dad’s VHS camera, and my cousins and second cousins or whoever those kids were.
It smelled musty in the country, like things that were too dry and slightly sour, but we kids were able to capture and ingest multiple brownies from the buffet spread as our parents yammered on for hours.
My stepmom had said that as of her last visit, my grandfather’s grave had been damaged by weather. It has a plane he flew carved into it, with realistic detail. I saw where a patch was missing, but I thought it wasn’t too bad, considering it was almost forty years old. I’ve always wondered at how my grandpa got such a fancy headstone when he was such a son of a bitch. My great-grandparents, people who were straight-up loved, had such a plain one. Just some flowers. I guess they were pretty broke, and maybe my dad, comparatively flush, wanted his dad to have a nice stone. Grandpa may not have been a great guy, but he had also died of bone cancer in his sixties, so people were probably feeling pretty bad about that.
(He got bone cancer from flying planes to nuclear test sites, which is a story I’d love to tell you another time.)
At Grandpa’s grave, I was angry.
On my mom’s side, my relationships are loving and uncomplicated.
My dad’s side is messy because his parents were messy.
I was thinking of my aunt, who is not buried up at our family hotspot, but closer to us, where I can definitely see her before All Saint’s Day. My grandpa fucked my aunt up really bad. Although she’s been dead a couple of years, and he’s been dead forty, I was suddenly so angry for her. How dare he treat her that way? How dare he fuck up all his children, my other aunt, my uncle, my father?
Ifuhe could have gotten his shit together. If he had not screamed and beaten people and kidnaped his own kids and married five different unfortunate women. I was finding some peace in blaming him for everything.
Maybe great-grandma had spoiled him. Had held him up as her golden child, had not accepted that he was violent, distant, unreliable.
But I mean they’re all dead now.
So whatever.
I cried a bit, which felt good. I have a hard time crying. IT felt good to cry about my grandpa being a fuck up, simultaneously mourning my own fucked up nature and lack of control.
I made two stops in Atchison: the Forest of Friendship, and the lynching memorial.
I did them in the wrong order.
But I’ll tell you in a better order.
My last stop aws the luynching memorial. Yes, I should have done peace last.
January 4, 1870, George Johnson was dragged outof the local jail, shot at, had a rope tied around his neck, beaten, dragged to the center of town, and shot some more., before finally being hanged.
HIs crime was accidentally injuring a white man while hunting.
The county attorney had said therer would be no chraged brought. Johnson’s only crime might have been leavin ghte scene. Of course, he was no doubt afraid he woudl be lunched if he didn’tleave th e scene.
THe monument says there have been 22 known racially motivated lynchings in Kansas.
I took a photo of the intersection where Johnson was tortured. Three corners had relatively new-looking buildings but one could have been there at the time.
As I stood there, people came and went from a grocery store, black people and white people.
The Forest of Friendship was a bit hard to find. ON the outskirts of Atchison, I drove around a little pond until I got to the right spot. The Forest had something to do with Amelia Earhart. This made no sense to me, and I like that. Why is there a forest dedicated to aviation?
Becuase Amelia Earhart said, “You haven’t seen a tree unless you’ve seen its shadow from the sky.” Which just nhw sounds Junginan, but at the time, I was like, what? I love trees from the ground, and form the sky, they just look like broccoli.
The path leading in has Joyce Kilmer’s poem, which so people must find cloying, but I agree with: trees’ hungry mouths are prest against earth’s sweet flowing breast.
Ahyway, Lorax that I am, I was thrilled to see the group of special trees. There were meandering pathways with tiles that had names of aviators. One of them was Lindberg, and I called him a fascist pig, but otherwise, there were nice people like Earhart, the Wright brothers, Leonardo Da Vinci, Chuck Yeager. (I don’t know that any of them were actually nice. I just don’t think any of them were fascist pigs.) A lot of them were people I didn’t know. The trees had monument name tags. I was the only person there, so I talked to myself, and to them, made my judgments. There were a lot of oaks, and that was boring. Oaks are not kidding around, and that’s great for them , but eh.
They had a smoke tree from Puerto Rico. Spindly.
The trees were from countries that the aviators were from, I guess
There were names of astronauts.
A pistachio tree from India.
A cork tree from Korea, that did give a little under my fingernail scratch.
There was Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
A sweet gum from Turkey.
A flowering peach from Israel.
An Alabama loblolly pine.
A big healthy sycamore grown from a seed that was taken to the moon. The plaque in front of him says, “To the stars through difficulties.” The best thing about Kansas s the motto, in Latin or English.
They have a monument to the shuttle explosion of 2003.
Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin had a stone.
I touched a leaf of every tree I could reach, understanding the shape and texture in my fingers. Although usually I’m a big deciduous fan, the firs and pines were the best, because some of them were like bristle blocks, some like combs, and some were so soft and whispery I brushed them on my cheek.
Going On 