One night I dreamt of a zen monastery in the middle of New York City and the next week I was at Ratna Ling, watching a yellow ribbon drift in the wind. Here’s how it all came about.
It was almost my birthday and I didn’t know what to do to celebrate. The date kept creeping closer and closer and before it was going to pass I asked my dream world to send me a message about what I should do. That night I dreamt I was in a cab and I was going from downtown to uptown and I was getting dropped off at Columbia University, but it wasn’t Columbia University, it was just two big buildings at the side of the road. I was looking and looking and looking for my dorm and when I couldn’t find it I walked behind the two buildings and came upon a platform that was empty and all around it there were monks sitting, illuminated by their own special lights in a circle meditating in the light rain. It was quiet, it was dark and I could feel the rain falling down on my dream face and it felt so good. I want to remember this, I said to myself in the dream, before I moved on to search for my dorm again in the urban woods.
“What’s the name of your dorm,” asked one monk, as I began to look distressed, and I showed him my ticket with the letter M on the top and the word mountain below.
“Mountain,” I said, and he brought me to a map which showed that the dorm was even deeper in towards the center of the city, but away from the street, and we both agreed that it was night, and it was dark and I should probably just stay there with the monks until the morning at least.
When I woke up in my bed the next morning I figured why not just look and see if there are any real zen monasteries close by offering a retreat. There were actually many, but one in my price range and close enough by and when I went to sign up there was ONE SPOT LEFT.
Let me just sleep on it, I thought, and I did the next night and when I woke up the spot was taken. I called. I wrote an email. I got a message back.
“Unfortunately, the retreat is full…” began the message, while I stomped around the room cursing the dream and myself for having asked and having waited.
I called back again.
“I know it’s full,” I said, “but after the text on the page changed to say just the NAME of the workshop and not the name of the workshop + there’s one spot left, I tried to sign up. I’m sure I’m too late.”
The volunteer on the other end of the line paused. “It was actually full but just now I got off of a call with a person who canceled. So you’re in luck.”
I danced around the room and shouted about how I’d be there in three days and confirmed with Olive’s dad that he could be a parent for three days while I sat in the woods out of the city and tended to my mind in a way that I hadn’t for quite a long time.
It was late when I left the city and the sun set against the ocean while I was on the way and I watched it sink down to a hot slice of nothing and I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen a sunset as special as that ever before. As I drove up the mountain the last light spread over a field of dried grass made white by a burst of flowers from the oncoming spring. I almost ran out of gas and the gaslight went on just as I passed the first station in twenty miles. In an incredible move of self-care I had called ahead and asked whether the volunteers wouldn’t set dinner aside for me, as I’d be arriving late, and so I knew that I didn’t have to stop for that on the way.
It was gorgeous once I got there but also still dark. In the morning I would notice tiny nooks with pillows and tall vases with flowers everywhere and from the cozy cabin where I’d wake up there’d be a window whose curtains would open up to a set of majestic trees and the sun rising up in between. Before I slept I ate a soup with kale and potatoes, a bowl of rice and mushroom gratin, a green salad with shredded carrots and some poached pears for dessert, all with the hunger of someone who had never been fed.
But let me first tell you something else amazing.
When I arrived and stepped out from the main building to find the path to the sleeping cabins I found myself holding my bags in front of a platform. Around it were small lights, illuminating not monks, but body sized spaces. It was not raining, but beside that it looked a whole lot like my dream.
“This is my dream! “I said to the volunteer who was leading me back, “I dreamt about a place just like this only a few days ago. Laid out with that flat open deck and the lights positioned in the grass all around it.”
She kind of just shrugged.
“This place sends out messages everywhere,” she said, as if it were normal to be summoned somewhere you’d never been, to be invited in where you had no reason to belong, to stay somewhere that felt good but nothing like home.
The next day over lunch, I told someone my dream.
“Maybe,” I offered, “most monasteries have a platform like this?”
“No,” she said, “I don’t think this is an unusual design for a monastery. Maybe you saw it somewhere before?”
“BUT WHERE?” I demanded to know, refusing to believe in anything but the impossible.
!! Send me to Lit Camp !!
15 annual subscriptions to Art Monster will get me to this Summer’s Lit Camp conference, where I will hone my craft with a group of writers while eating food again that someone else has cooked. Subscribers will, in turn, receive all my notes from the workshops including one from the luminous Ingrid Rojas Contreras. I have already been accepted with a partial scholarship and you can read my application here. Help me get the rest of the way!! And thank you Aimee to be the first person to pledge your support.