Rail Retreat, Chapter 4 -- Morning

“It has always seemed to me that true natural presence, true wild being, involves no tuning out of anything. It must be absolutely contemplative – openly receptive to all the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings that exist in each immediate moment. I believe it is civilization, the taming of our nature, that has taught us to focus on a single task and tune out what we consider to be distractions. I acknowledge that we do have to do this to function well in our society – but it just isn’t natural.
By the time we reach adulthood, most of us are so conditioned to focusing attention that the concentrated one-track mind is the only way we have of approaching situations. As we mature, we may be vaguely aware of mission something, but we are too far away from it even to give it a name.
What we are missing is fullness of life. To put it simply, in concentrating on one thing at a time, we miss everything else.”
(Gerald May, The Wisdom of Wilderness, pp. 61, 64)

I often overlook it – the first exhilarating morning stretch; the soft warmth of the blanket and the nest it has helped me create; the early morning quiet before the busy stirring. This morning there is more. Out the window – where?
Misty, dawn-smoke seeping through evergreens on the mountains.
Shallow, white rapids streaming over rocks in the river below.
Curving tracks, each emerging view more compelling than the last.
A lone white plastic chair abandoned on the river bank across the way.
Fingerling waterfalls down the opposite bank, and then near enough to touch. Waterfalls – suddenly a lattice-work of falls.
Patches of remnant snow at the edge of the woods.
Northern California I eventually learn – Dunsmuir.
Over breakfast I overhear that it is typically dark when the train passes through this area. Suddenly I am grateful for the delays that held the experience until dawn. Apparently Mt. Shasta is off to the right, but it is raining gently and the visibility is too limited to see it.
The day has begun, and I intend to tune little out.

Rail Retreat, Chapter 3 -- Evening

“Be still” has been the mantra of the day in more ways than one. As the morning posting suggested, it was to be my inner instruction. Little did I know that it would prove to be an accurate external one as well. After departing on time from Los Angeles, and arriving perhaps a few minutes early in Santa Barbara a couple of hours later, the latter part of that day has been marked by stillness on the track. Delay leaving San Luis Obispo; a freight train with priority here, a track repair crew there, and there, and there. Good practice in watching, listening, and simply, patiently “being.”

Which is to say that if we were corporately enduring stillness outside, I was slowing to embrace it within. Settling into a seat in the observation car mid-afternoon, I cursed myself for arriving without a book. I was alone, after all, and nothing to do but sit. Perverse! “Just be still,” whispered the Voice, and I was. More than a narrative or a thesis was beckoning me through the glass. Which is also to say that the books and the tasks have been less compelling today than the grace outside the window. On one side mountains; on the other, ocean with waves and beaches, splashing rocks and an occasional sea lion. Sometimes we were high on a bluff above, looking down on ground-covering succulents that carpeted the dunes; other times we seemed close enough to need a towel if we could have only opened the windows. Sometimes the route S-curved so tightly that the entire train was visible from engine to end.

It is darkness now, and we are moving – rapidly, by the sound of it, as if to make up time. And it is quiet apart from the rails. Quiet – inside and out.

Rail Retreat, Chapter 3 -- Morning

“…my mind suddenly erupts with ideas of things to do. …get everything arranged so I start enjoying myself. The impulses are almost desperate, as if my mind has awakened startled, terrified by its own depth of peacefulness, abruptly afraid of dying from inaction. I respond immediately. …ready to unpack…I am simply stopped by something. I feel it within me, inside my very muscles, yet it seems to come from somewhere outside me. It is not me, yet it is rising from the deepest part of me. It is powerful, as if a great gentle hand has taken my arms and legs and simply stilled them, and a sweet irresistible voice is speaking in my belly, ‘Be still now.’ It’s not a real voice, not actual hearing, but the message is clear: no rush, no need to do anything, just be.”
(Gerald May, The Wisdom of the Wilderness, p. 19)

Morning, and palm trees silhouetted against the gold-blue streaked sunrise. California – quite a contrast to the snowy plains of Colorado and the desert red of New Mexico. Breakfast was early, then packing to detrain. The Southwest Chief pulled into Los Angeles’ Union Station at 8:00 a.m. – 15 minutes early – and the progress board indicates that the Coast Starlight is on time for its 10:15 a.m. departure. So far so good!

I have settled into a kind of rhythm – seeking to give into that voice inviting me to “be still now.” I have work to do, but at least some part of that work is stillness. I have decided to observe Phyllis Tickle’s The Divine Hours, a contemporary rendering of the Benedictine prayerful ordering of the day. Through prayers and scriptures, it patterns each day into The Morning Office (observed sometimes between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m.), The Midday Office (between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.) and Vespers (between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m.). In between, I am devoting some time to reading, and a larger block of time to writing. After vespers, so far I have continued with some devotional reading, followed by an indulgence until bedtime in a mystery. Throughout the day, as long as there is light, there is the window, and the landscape moving and changing and engaging. And there is the voice…

“…be still now.”

Rail Retreat, Chapter 2 -- Evening of a Day of Extremes

It hasn’t taken long to notice that trains don’t pull into the center of town – except those towns small enough to have nothing but a center, whose memories are stronger than their imaginations. If tracks used to line the nerve centers of civic commerce, now they form the industrial entrails of a community’s underside. Railway stations share their neighborhood with freight cars and transport trucks, warehouses and vacant lots; barbed-wire enclosures piled with the twisted metal remnants of whatever was useful that has already been cannibalized for something else, rather than the hotels and restaurants, services and shops that once upon a time welcomed de-boarding passengers. If a city were a body, I have no doubt what part of its anatomy would be the train station. The pleasantries of urban enclaves have long since migrated in more scenic, quieter and less grimy directions. The platforms make for useful exercise tracks when a stop is long enough to permit it; but it is Spartan, utilitarian, mechanical surroundings.

The conductor came on the PA earlier in the afternoon to chastise smokers. The train, like other forms of public transportation, is non-smoking by government regulation. Signs are clearly posted. Reminders are courteously announced. But the frustration in the conductor’s voice, noting that “we are well aware that some are going to the lower level to smoke” and that “everyone can smell it” betrayed his loss of patience. He reiterated the rules, and looked ahead to the next available smoking stop.

On the one hand, I cheered his announcement. I hate the smell, and while I hadn’t in this case been bothered by it (perhaps the offenders were on a different car), I don’t want any noxious migration. As we pulled into Albuquerque for an hour-long stop, several virtually leapt onto the platform to light up.

I wonder about my own voices – addictions – that perhaps are subtler but no less distracting and controlling – and potentially offensive. What are those attachments in my own life so compelling that they cause me to risk censure and eviction at the next available station? To what have I given myself, and to what ends will I go to accommodate its demands?

As the “all aboard” was sounded, I noticed several final and impassioned drags on the platform before the butts were stubbed and the soothed hopped back on board. I’ll keep them, too, in my prayers, hoping that at least a few of them take the time to remember me in theirs.

Rail Retreat, Chapter 2 -- Morning

We mercifully slept across Kansas, and though I took advantage of several unintentional opportunities to notice the moon, in-between views I rested comfortably well. The smell of brewing coffee signaled morning, and I began to absorb the prospects of the day. Stirring, I gathered my supplies and headed downstairs. The shower I had dreaded proved to be simpler than my expectations. It had its limitations, but after managing in Nicaragua last spring with a barrel of water and a bowl to pour over my head in the company of chickens around my feet, with only a fluttering plastic tarp for privacy, Amtrak offered elegant luxury.

I shared a breakfast table in the dining car with George and Ann from Connecticut, on their way to Flagstaff to visit relatives. A vacation, of sort, it is their first time to ride the train. Since Ann refuses to fly, she is hoping it all goes well so that George might agree to future trips. The 5-hour delay between New York and Chicago that forced an unintended overnight between trains offered a bumpy start, but since Chicago the Southwest Chief has been running precisely on time. Now into the Mountain Time zone, our first opportunity for fresh air and a stretch came shortly after 8 a.m. during a 30-minute stop in La Junta, CO. The chilly exercise gave me a chance to inventory my rolling community in the daylight – 10 cars consisting of two engines, one baggage car, one dormitory car, two sleeper cars, one dining car, an observation car and two coach cars.

Now rolling again toward the southwest, the snow-covered plains pass outside my window, only occasionally interrupted by bluffs and gorges and buttes. And it is time to pay broader and deeper attention.

Rail Retreat, Chapter 1 -- Boarding

Wilderness is not just a place; it is also a state of being. If happiness means being happy and sadness means being sad, then wilderness means being wilder. Look it up, and you'll find that the primary meaning of wild is "natural." In turn, "natural" comes from the Latin nasci, meaning "to be born." Words like natal, nativity, and native come from the same root, all referring to birth. Wilderness, then, is not only the nature you find outdoors. It can also refer to your own true Nature -- the You that is closest to your birth. This inner wildness is the untamed truth of who you really are.
(Gerald G. May in The Wisdom of Wilderness, 2006, p. XIX)

So, I have boarded the train -- my own little encounter with wilderness; hoping not so much for "wildness" in the way I might have otherwise thought of it, but certainly something like my "own true nature" -- the "me" which, according to May, is closest to my birth. As I told my beloved on the night before my leaving, I have felt myself grow "shallowed out", which I suppose is something akin to drifting away from the true nature, the "birth-self" that is deeper, more grounded than the self I have, of late, become. Already the swaying of the train along its track -- not at all unlike a ship in turbulent waters -- has begun to dislodge from me the steady assurance I left in the station. This is foreign land to me -- first missing, then stepping into my car, only to feel totally lost; climbing the stairs and immediately taking a wrong turn; exploring to find bathrooms and showers; running into dead ends in pursuit of the dining car; settling down to dinner in the company of Max whose first impression offered little promise of conversation. And yet Max turns out to have grandparents in San Angelo, scarcely an hour from my childhood home -- and visited there last summer. And he lives in Kansas City, a block or so from one of our favorite getaways. That he loves "cage boxing" and shares an apartment with a musician in a heavy metal band more fascinated than repelled me.

The full moon outside my window and the occasional pause at a station serves to ground and orient me. And now it is about time to recruit Lisa, the steward assigned to my car through to Los Angeles, to assemble my bed. A bit of wilderness, perhaps, all its own.

Rolling Retreat -- the Overture

So, I've got to catch a train. It began seven years ago when I returned to work after a 3-month sabbatical having learned at least two things: one, that I hate workshops; two, that I need time alone. When I reported these findings to the Personnel Committee and requested permission and blessing to honor both insights in practice (meaning: avoid workshops, and schedule retreats), they responded, "Is that all?" What a precious place to work! Since then, I've tried to schedule week-long retreats each year. Not vacation -- I schedule that, too, but vacation is a different category (like the separate stomach compartments that receive vegetables and ice cream. "Full" in the former does not necessarily mean "full" in the latter). Sometimes retreats are for being quiet, praying, and reading. Some are for writing. Some are for preparing. Some involve all three. The common denominators, however, are solitude and absence.

This year's version will be different for me. The agenda will be familiar -- reading, writing, quieting and listening -- but the setting will be new. In fact, it will be constantly changing. Sunday evening I will board the Amtrak Southwest Chief at Galesburg, IL and ride it to Los Angeles, CA, where I will connect with Amtrak's Coast Starlight on which I'll ride to Portland, OR. After an overnight, I'll jump on Amtrak's Empire Builder that will trek eastward through Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota and ultimately down through Milwaukee to Chicago. At Chicago, I'll climb aboard the Illinois Zephyr which, with any luck, will return me to me car in Galesburg.

I'm packed -- with one suitcase full of clothes and another full of books and technology. I have Lenten sermons to write, special services to develop, a college syllabus to draft, books to read, and a clickety-clacked anonymity to dissolve into. I can't wait!

And along the way I plan to blog -- daily, or at least as often as I can find Internet access -- about conversations I have, sights that pass by my window, reflections that scratch their way through to consciousness. And perhaps an illustrative photo or two.

Stay tuned.