The 10-hour drive from Maine along the New York State Thruway and then on old Route 5 & 20 into Western New York State was a nonstop memory loop of thoughts and feelings about your life, your past, and future, all mixed with poignant memories of many years of returning to retreats at Springwater Center for Meditative Inquiry. You stopped for lunch in Canadaigua, NY, at the same Chinese restaurant where, over 30 years ago on this same journey, you had ordered the same pork mu-shu and rice. Not much has changed here, although the son of the restaurant’s owners now runs the place. The farms and houses, stores and landscape along the way were all still the same as you remembered them, in surprising detail, like a dream revisited.
It has been years since you were last at Springwater, and, after unpacking, you are off on a walk into the fields and woods, and you are overwhelmed by a strange sense of deep sadness and longing for this place where you had spent some of the happiest (and some of the most challenging) times of your life. On your return, however, the only thing that matters is the silence, the deep, vast, palpable silence that was waiting for you as though it knew you would return; would have to return. Returning to this silence and stepping so suddenly out of the commotion of the world is a great lesson for anyone troubled by life, by events, by the complications of the mind. The silence is just here. It is never not here. It is unmovable and waits patiently for our return.
