Retreat Morning in Late December

There are mornings that you wake up in a room that is not your usual room. You don’t always remember at first that you chose to forego home in the interest of… well, of something that you don’t yet have the words for.

That’s what retreats are about: venturing into wordless regions of your heart that you may lead your daily life acknowledging without knowing how to enter them, feel at home in them, speak the truth from them.

The words are just not there.

Not yet.

It is hard to expect the people who are family and friends and colleagues to ask you about regions of your heart for which you yourself don’t yet have words. So any retreat is a solitary venture.

There can be sadness that surfaces in a retreat. It is simply a sadness most of us manage not to feel in our daily lives. At times, that sadness is a first step in recognizing that we are a little lost, that there is no map for this.

So what is the wise step after waking up in a room that is not your usual room?

You break the fast. You walk yourself into a kitchen. You find the cup around which you can curve your hands.

And you look out into a cold morning sky that only gulls seem yet to have found a home in.