Dear Lenka, dear Tomáš
This morning I left without saying goodbye.
I trust that, in all your wisdom, you won’t take my behaviour as rudeness and so won’t be hurt by it. My longing for home got the better of waiting for you to wake up.
Now, at home in the middle of the night, my sleep has vanished under the flood of returning experiences from the dark, and of today’s encounters, emotions, the mass of impressions, sounds, words and activities out here “outside”.
And so I’m writing. I owe you that goodbye. And a thank you.
How to describe the indescribable without it sounding banal…
The name of your (and for a little while my) dark hut – the Northern Sanctuary – I only fully understood once I was inside. Sacred time. Undisturbed, therapeutic, full in its emptiness….
I like having the chance to be just on my own. After Mr Hrabal, I call it my Too Loud a Solitude 🙂 . But here it was also long, and wrapped the whole time in a deep inner sense of peace.
Try as I might, I couldn’t fend off certain expectations.
Not much of that happened here.
Staring into absolute darkness, watching my thoughts, listening to the silence, meditation and prayer, gentle yoga – uniting body, breath and mind, patience taking turns with restlessness, walks along the walls, bodily needs, food, thinking, singing, dreaming – waking…
Round and round, seven days and nights, like in a fairy tale.
Days and nights, with the boundary between them fading. One thing at a time. And there’s plenty of time 🙂 Time to hear, in the silence, the answer to your question, time to hand over old pain, to dissolve thoughts going round in circles, time for pure being, for opening the heart..
In the sleeping bag, a deep, bodily feeling of being a dragonfly larva, a metamorphosis.
I smile at the mirroring. It’s here too 🙂
Family
A reliable thermostat, quietly humming, switching on and off to keep it pleasantly warm (except when my hasty fiddling with it brings on a chilly spell). The occasional song of a little bird outside, bringing joy, so sweet and precious. The wind with its moods, whistling, howling almost eerily, wailing, and then falling quiet again. Food you wait for, not knowing when it will come or what it will be, and you accept the variety of flavours with gratitude..
Friends
Precious little things that help enormously: mala beads, dark chocolate, a smooth gemstone, citrus, cedar and lavender, warm tea, a meditation cushion…
Other company
An ant in the blueberries, a night-time mouse under the hut and its far-too-loud gnawing that made sleep impossible, a clucking hen bringing me back into the reality of time.
A mishap that drove me outside and straight away made me think about my own foolishness. Coming back, and tears of gratitude.
The darkness gave me enormous gifts
A few surprising insights in dreams and meditations. Deep feelings of love, peace and humility. May I manage to keep the treasure I’ve found. May it benefit others too.
That’s for the days to come…
A blackbird has just whistled outside. Time to go to sleep 🙂
And so I say goodbye to you. And thank you so much. For the sanctuary, for your loving care, for everything… thank you, thank you, thank you.
No longer a larva and not yet a dragonfly. Transformation isn’t easy,
Hanka
