The quiet here is sonorous.
When I first came to Southern Dharma Retreat Center for a weeklong silent retreat, the stillness was a balm. A quiet respite from the bustle of the exterior world. Rustling clothes, little coughs, clinking silverware, crunching gravel, ringing bells: these are the sounds that permeate a nestled community of meditators.
The longer a retreat progresses, the more mindful people become of the noise they make. Steps slow. Breaths slow. Meals slow. Mind and bodies grow quiet.
Now, at the close of my six weeks of residing and volunteering at SDRC, I’ve felt a new dimension of silence. When full, there are up to 40 people chewing, clinking, walking, and coughing. It’s a muffled alternative to car wheels, ringing phones, or music crooning through headphones, but the sound is there. It’s a susurrus, a harmonized hum of energy each person contributes to.
It rises and crests on the final day of each retreat, when Noble Silence is lifted. After committing to the silence of body, speech, and mind for a week—meaning no speaking, reading, gesturing, nothing—a lunch with chatter sounds more like an uproar. Sounds burst with laughter and excitement before settling again. People check their watches, itch for their cell phones, and calculate what time they’ll make it home. When the final car ascends up the serpentine gravel road, bearing its passenger back to “The Real World,” a deeper quiet settles over this valley.
The creek sputters. The leaves, crackled and colored with the dry, October chill, percuss sweetly in the trees. The staff, wearily satisfied, spread out across the grounds to rest in their cabins and cottages. All that’s left are the crickets and the birds, singing to each other.
My work here has been simple: Help in whatever way I can.
That looks like guiding cars into the parking lot, washing dishes, preparing meals, tending fires, cleaning bathrooms, weed-eating, writing, and countless small tasks that sprout each day.
I have the compulsion to be good. Goodness, in my conditioned view, equates to usefulness. (I reflected on this earlier this fall in How the soul dies.)
This notion pains me. If my goodness and worth are determined by my usefulness, what happens when I get sick and can no longer work? What happens when I grow old? What happens when I die? Will I no longer be loveable, no longer be good?
My first week as a retreatant here, I burst into tears in a tiny office adjoining the kitchen. For the first time, I was straddling engaged meditative practice and work. I was sitting for a retreat, but also had to communicate, make decisions, manage expectations, and do what was my lot to do. I felt I was failing, not meeting the expectations of the meditation teacher or the retreat staff.
I wasn’t, of course. The shame and guilt of not doing enough for the community, not going deeply enough into the practice—it was all from the vantage point that insufficiency is a sin. And it was all contrived, originating from my inner world, stemming back to the painful seed that goodness equates to usefulness.
That seed has grown many tendrils, each evolution more curled and vine-like than the next. It’s clever. It tricks me into thinking it’s a necessary function. It’s like looking up to admire an old oak’s canopy, only to realize you’re staring at the leaves of a massive poison ivy vine.
The three poison leaves of greed, shame, and blame wave at me from above, convincing me they’re meant to be there, and that the tree is better off with them around.
Sitting on a cushion after long periods of meditation, I can see the “I” arise in those three leaves, and see plainly the pain they cause. I watch how greed affirms a sense of self, a claim to something that I must have and they must not. Shame and blame, as well: the negative view of what they make of me, or I of them.
It’s fear. Fear of not being useful, and therefore not being good, and of course then not being loved.
Identifying this ego-affirming fear during practice, while sitting with open attention on whatever arises, is one thing. It’s a whole other thing to catch myself playing into this dynamic in real-life interactions.
That’s the benefit of a residency: an opportunity to integrate both formal practice within a real-world training ground.
I’ve realized that truly meditative work does not involve greed, shame, or blame. In dedicated practice, if someone needs help, it is offered freely. If something’s left undone, there is compassion for whoever forgot.
We are all humans here, none of us enlightened. Don’t let me lead you to believe that the inner working of meditation centers is perfectly equanimous. There are irritating interactions and reactive tendencies within each of us, and many preconceived notions of what’s “right” and “wrong” flailing in our psyches.
But, from that space, each member of the Southern Dharma staff seems fully dedicated to their own self-awareness, ownership, and development.
Still, there a glimpses of that true meditative work state. Happy moments while washing pans, assisting someone who needs help, and arranging flowers because they bring cheer to the room.
When a retreat is not in session, staff open each meeting with the Samu Gatha. (Gathas are short verses or poems that call us to the present moment, and Samu is the mindful practice of physical work.) It encapsulates this philosophy of work and service better than I could ever explain:
May this work be done in a spirit of generosity,
Not driven by ego, greed, or delusion.
May kindness sustain us and prevail in conflict.
And compassion guide us and lead us to understanding.
May we rejoice in the successes of others.
And remain unmoved by praise or blame.
—Samu Gatha used at Southern Dharma Retreat Center
originally from Upaya Zen Center
A retreat is going on, as I write. They’re eating a breakfast of steel-cut oats and granola and banana bread with coffee. Bowls and spoons clink together in the other room.
When I woke this morning, all was silent but the wind. A drizzle fell in side-long gusts, and I walked in darkness towards the meditation hall.
Slipping off my shoes on the veranda, I stood at the threshold of the one-room building and bowed to the Buddha statue sitting on its altar across the hall. I stepped between meditation cushions to the woodstove in the corner. It was 5:00, time to get the fire burning so the meditators would have a warm and well-lit room for their 6:30 sit.
I moved from building to building, tending fires, accompanied only by the hiss and crackle of wood. By the time the first yogi awoke, coming to meditate by one of the woodstoves, I’d begun preparing breakfast. Boiling eggs, cooking oatmeal, brewing coffee.
When all my work is finished this morning, I’ll sweep out my cabin and ride my book-laden car up the gravel road. I’ll be back here again, soon enough. In the meantime, I’m taking the Samu Gatha with me, and the memory of silence.