The Hideout.
Meditations on home + healing in unfamiliar spaces.
At a time when so many families, homes, and safe spaces here in the U.S. are under threat, consider donating whatever you can to any local organizations like CHIRLA, who are devoted to raising critical funds to protect the most vulnerable families + immigrants’ rights with essential legal services and advocacy.
Last week I was peeling a pile of multicolored carrots I pulled from a huge bag in the refrigerator. Raffi was sitting at the dining table watching an episode of Hilda we know by heart called “The Fairy Mound,” and as the dialogue and music danced between soft and spooky, I inadvertently slipped into a rhythm of trimming, peeling, slicing that felt quiet and good. It wasn’t until a few days later when I was walking home from drop-off that I remembered—oh yeah…carrots.
And something came back to me.
When I was in my 20s I started spending time at the Zen Mountain Monastery. I went mostly in the hopes of learning to meditate by way of formal silent and/or writing retreats. That’s what I told myself. I might even become a better writer, too. But being in-between apartments and sleeping on a friend’s pull-out sofa with no end in sight, I felt perpetually unmoored. With no place of my own to hang a dress or stack my journals—all my (not very) worldly belongings scattered in boxes across various family members’ closets/attics—I yearned for a place that was mine. A closet. A shelf. Even if it was temporary.
I emphasize that sensation of being unmoored, which isn’t at all uncommon in your 20s, when such a feeling becomes this low-grade electrical hum running throughout everything you have or do or want. But back then, I was reaching a point when the hum was shifting to restlessness…and depression, like a dark weather system coming in that I could sense way before I could see. It scared me. And, having nowhere to really call my own, I think the monastery became my “place.”
Everything about it energized me…and gave my gloomy calendar structure. The subway ride to Port Authority where I boarded the bus on the two-hour journey north. The way the landscape gradually shifted from hard and gray to soft and green. The tiny monastery shuttle that scooped me up along with other weekend students hoping to unload all their worries and garbage for a day or two. The ritual of going became as much a refuge for me as the monastery itself. A blessed break in my regular programming of catastrophizing, and a place that seemed to not only welcome me but everything I quietly hated about myself and my life at that time, too.
Meditating (ie: Zazen) didn’t come easily, and some mornings at 5 a.m. when the sky was still waking up, I would join my bunkmates silently making my way to the warmly lit meditation hall, wondering the whole time, what in God’s name am I even doing here?? None of it was logical. But something called to me about this place that was strange and rustic and satisfied this weird longing in me. And, as I settled onto my cushion and nervously fidgeted myself into a comfortable position that I could hold for an hour or more, I felt content. Drinking in the warm light of the room, in the quiet, the subtle vibrations of other feeling bodies nearby. Some mornings I would worry, from start to finish, mentally cycling over and over a rough conversation or my Amex bill. Some mornings I would alternate between the steady gong of my heart and tears. And some mornings I would find the rhythm of ALL of it getting shuffled together just right, so that I slipped into another place…somewhere voiceless and timeless, where everything good in the world felt available to me.
Above, a cabin/hermitage at the Zen Mountain Monastery assigned to residents with permission from the abbot. Below, the main meditation hall.
Even though I wasn’t earning much money, I kept booking more bus tickets to Mount Tremper. Unpuzzling what was going on in my brain and forging some kind of path ahead was part of it. But even if I couldn’t put my finger on it then, I think I kept coming back for something else. The clusters of wood paneled arts & crafts buildings. The gardens. The plain Shaker-style twin bed and cotton blankets that smelled like hand soap and rosemary. A place I didn’t have to change to accept me.
A hideout. A home.
Most of what I learned at the monastery wasn’t directly related to meditating. Or maybe it was (and THAT is the secret:). As part of our work there, all residents were assigned various jobs and upkeep around the property. Sometimes it was laundry, sometimes it was toilets, no matter what task we got, we learned that caring for the monastery was caring for ourselves and everyone/everything we knew and also didn’t know.
Late one afternoon during one of the silent retreats, I was assigned to meal prep, peeling a gargantuan heap of 300 carrots from the monastery garden that would be prepared for communal dinner that night. In silence, I cleaned, trimmed, and peeled, one after the other, again and again, getting lost in the repetitive motion. I was paired for the job with another woman. She was older than me, maybe as old as I am now. And about an hour into our work, she began to cry. At first it was fleeting, discreet…with a sly swipe of a tear. But after a while she started sobbing in a way that was hard to ignore. We weren’t allowed to speak and I wasn’t even sure what would happen if I was caught doing so, but listening to her so close to me made my heart ache.
“Are you okay?” I whispered.
Photo by Jen Steele.
She didn’t answer. Not right away. But about five or ten minutes later, there huddled together in a corner of the kitchen, she began to tell me how she ended up there in a monastery peeling carrots with me. At first I was nervous to be breaking the rules, or what would even happen if I was caught. But my curiosity got the better of me. At the time, I could barely understand why I was there myself, and suddenly the details of her stay seemed SO much more important.
She told me she had been an advertising executive for many years, and then she and her husband had suddenly split. Soon after, she was fired from her job (not “let go”—Fired, that’s what she said). Maybe it was this holy/monastic place or the forbidden circumstances of our exchange that made me listen to her so intently, but I hung on every word—all while looking straight ahead, never directly at her, and peeling carrots, one after the next. I wanted to hug her, but I was too afraid if I did the spell would be broken. She told me someone had told her about the monastery and that it was a good place for her to “hide out” while she grieved the life that fell away, and also maybe figured out what she wanted to do next. When she shared that she was staying for two months I remember immediately feeling outrageously jealous. Really, really jealous that she would be spending so long in this beautiful place. And even MORE jealous of what she might end up learning about herself + life because of it.
No one ever checked on us. We never faced each other, never stopped peeling. But I felt close to her. And lucky. Like somehow, we ended up being paired by this random stroke of fate. I couldn’t understand what it might be like for a 50-something person to be there mending a gaping hole in their life.
But I do now.
Getting to listen to her story while doing something I never before gave much thought to like vacuuming or taking out the trash, turned out to be the part of home I’d been missing the most. I always thought of home as a place…a container for my life and my stuff. It had never occurred to me that it was also a practice. Peeling carrots, folding laundry, dusting your bookshelves, tending to everyday life was the love and the glue and the holiness that connected everything else. Maybe it takes decades of living and losing people and pets and jobs and versions of ourselves to really know that (I’m sure daily meditation helps:).
Ever since I remembered that afternoon with that woman, I’ve thought about her everyday. What happened to her while she was at the monastery? What did she do when she left…or maybe she didn’t? Where is she now? I can still see the outline of her body and her light brown wavy shoulder-length hair on my left side in my periphery. When I remember that, it’s almost as if she was a ghost…or someone from another dimension dropping in to peel carrots with me and quantum-leap timelines to give me information 30 years before I would need it. Maybe I was never meant to know her again. But she gave me something that day that I needed. And still need. To be a good listener. To set aside my own problems and use all my presence to have hope for someone I didn’t know who was starting over again.
Someone who was brave.
In the beginning I felt like I was hiding out there, too, in search of a place that held me when I needed to be held. But it was so much more than that. Like, sometimes it’s our homes that are the in-between spaces. And, sometimes it’s our lives that are the thing in-between. Either way, something as simple and silly as peeling carrots can reconnect us…to what our truest home can actually feel like.
When the pandemic came, I considered meditating again. I tried a few different methods and none of them stuck. Every morning I would wake up at 5ish a.m., sit on the floor next to my desk and try again. Some mornings I could get into a groove for 15 or even 20 minutes…I got this, I thought, like riding a Buddhist bicycle 😬. But most mornings I would tap out at 10 and just go start the coffee. My life is so different now from when I was 27 and searching for a home. I wasn’t tethered to a phone, I read a lot more books. I remembered everyone’s phone numbers by heart, whether I liked them or not. We may have less space in our lives it seems for discovering the magic of peeling carrots. Or emptying the dish-washer. But it’s there. Like an electrical panel with all these switches that can reboot your brain. Or your bathroom! I love that about home and tending to mine. Because no matter how low I might get or how stuck I may feel in my own grinding gears, there’s always something on my To Do list, a switch to flip. Or some carrots to peel for dinner…xxCb
AND…some groovy links you might like.
• I’m rather lazy when it comes to skincare and rely a lot on all-in-one type serums. This one lately is pretty great.
• I went to high school with the interior designer Jamie Bush and what I remember most about him, other than his kindness, was his deep love for taking his Sunfish sailboat out on the Bay. Whenever photos of his converted house boat show up in my feed as they did this morning—the very definition of tiny and magical—it never ceases to delight me. (Photos by Simon Upton for World of Interiors).
• Wanna come to Brimfield with me & Cool Best Friend? Spots are limited, so book your seat for either our July day trip (7/10) or September (9/5). Discounts when you book with a bestie. Here’s a link to drop your info and get all the details. Come! Come! Come!
• I LOVED this video of Anya the Gardener sewing Erigeron seeds (which look like teeny daisies). As a very amateur gardener who prefers a Miss Rumphius approach, flinging seeds everywhere, her technique speaks deeply to me.
• I 100% want these silver sandals by Nomasei, aren’t they PERFECT? Fun fact, this is the shoe brand SJP wore to the AJLT launch party (pic down below).
• Also, after I posted that I ordered these J. Crew bottoms on my IG Stories, they are turning out to be the summer pant of The Moment (ie: pants that will not make you sweat). I ordered the medium and the large in case they shrink, and I will wear them over every bathing suit/under every sundress I have until the end of time.
Over and out…xxCb
There’s always more marvelous stuff, always vetted, including a collection called Fun w/a Button-Down Shirt, right here in our Tiny Shop on ShopMy. Remember if you click on something or buy anything, we might make a tiny commission, for which we are plenty grateful. ❤️
You are such a gift
Thank you for sharing your stories. I feel transported to the time and place instantly.