Something Very Peculiar

Immediately when you arrive in the Sahara for the first time, or the tenth time, you notice the stillness.  Then there's the sky, compared to which all other skies seem faint-hearted efforts.  Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape.  Presently you will either shiver and hurry back inside familiar walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you . . .  Here in this holy mineral landscape, lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears.  Nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. 

-Paul Bowles

Bowles was speaking of the Sahara, but something of the same awaits each person who arrives in Death Valley for the first time (or the tenth).  Ah, to be welcomed by that vast sweeping desert floor, with majestic mountains like skyscrapers defining the distant perimeter.  And the sky-oh, that sky!-that goes on forever.  In recent years I have gone to this sacred landscape ten times (or more) and still I am awed by the spaciousness that is to be found there.  Or rather, I am awed by the spaciousness inside that this vast desert mirrors back.

Curiously, I first heard this passage read by the Buddhist teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who used Bowles' words as a metaphor for what can happen in deep meditation.  I have been sitting daily for a decade and, just like with my arrivals in Death Valley, I am still awed by the spaciousness inside that awaits after days on the cushion.  Like Goldstein, I have often wondered how this inner and outer spaciousness might be related to each other-how one could further augment the other.  The School's "Open Desert, Open Mind" program was borne out of this curiosity-a curiosity I share deeply with my co-guide and co-creator, Cazeaux Nordstrum.

I began leading School of Lost Borders program and sitting long Buddhist retreats within a year of each other.  From the beginning I wondered if the two were complementary or conflicted.   Here was my fear.  A central part of the SLB ceremony is storytelling: participants each in search of a deeper, more resonant telling of their lifestories, inspired by visions and other blessings received during time on the land.  This way seemed to contradict the core Buddhist teaching that a fixed self is an illusion, and that the stories we tell about ourselves are merely proliferations that create the illusion of something more fixed and permanent.

Most Buddhist teachers would acknowledge that each of us is forever engaged in the act of "selfing": creating an I-me-mine storyline designed to cohere some kind of identity around the ever-shifting flow of moment-to-moment experience.  After all, we humans are "storytelling animals"-so it has been, and always will be so. 

Ah, but how true, how kind, how helpful are the stories we tell?

What a School of Lost Borders program and a Buddhist retreat have in common is that each offers a different (yet complementary) practice for cultivating a higher quality of storytelling.  At the School we speak of vision, intention, fasting, authentic storytelling, deep listening; and we invite the vast open space of the desert to provide the container-the mirror-for this mind-opening, heart-opening practice.  On a Buddhist retreat, the language also begins with vision (Right View) and intention (Right Intention), while embracing the cultivation of stillness, insight and lovingkindness as yet another kind of mind-opening, heart-opening practice that helps a yogi to access a deeper storyline inside. 

When Cazeaux and I began weaving these two together with a group out in Death Valley, we consciously aimed at simplicity.  The shared group intent was for participants to open to spaciousness, inside themselves while sitting and outside while walking the land.  And so the program itself had to be spacious-much more so than any other either of us have co-led before.  Like many School programs, we used the Four Shields teaching as the basic framework of the week: each successive day focusing on a new direction, culminating in a 24-hour solo on the fourth full day.  And yet the framing of "A Day in The South," for example, was done far more experientially, with only the lightest of spoken teachings about the south shield. Instead we invited each person to drop down into their own direct experience of body and emotion-be it during a guided meditation, a silent sit, or while walking alone on the land.  Like most all SLB programs, we also circled for storytelling, each late afternoon in a large group and each evening in small groups.  Again, in keeping with the theme of spaciousness, we invited each person's storyline for the week to emerge from inside out, rather than as a response to themes being developed by the two guides.

The risk of this bare-bones approach is that we might offer too little form or guidance to carry a group through the week.  No worries, it turned out.  The group felt safe and held-by the two of us, our three assistants, the whole circle, and-most of all-the wide open space of the desert. 

No one had to "shiver and hurry back inside familiar walls."  Yes, everyone did keep "standing there."  And for each, "something very peculiar" did happen.

 Scott Eberle

Note:  Scott and Cazeaux are co-guides for the School's two sister programs: the 9-day desert-based Open Desert, Open Mind; and a year-long Bay Area-based Open Sky, Open Mind.  In the next newsletter, watch for Cazeaux's article,  "A Year-long Pilgrimage in Nature," telling about their experiences with the Open Sky program.