Personal History

Back when I was in my late 40s, I attended a seven-day Zen meditation retreat at Lake Allatoona, a man-made lake formed by a dam on Georgia's Etowah River (there are no natural lakes in Georgia).

By my count, I've attended four such seven-day retreats and a larger number of three- to four-day day retreats, and this was my second.  I bring up numbers not out of any sense of accomplishment but simply to demonstrate that I was familiar with the dynamics and rhythms of retreats of this kind, and while no master, I knew what I was getting into.

Typically, a seven-day retreat starts with a certain number of people and that number decreases as the retreat goes on.  But after about Day 4, the participants are winnowed down to the hard-core adherents, the die-hards who will stick it out to the very end.  It's unusual to lose many participants after Day 4.

On Day 4 of this particular retreat, a Tuesday (we had started on Saturday), we began our 10 to 12 hours of daily meditation before dawn, as per the usual custom.  We sat in mediation from 5:00 a.m. until 6:00, with five minutes of silent walking meditation (kinhin) halfway through.  Breakfast was eaten in relative silence (talking was not forbidden, but idle chit-chat was discouraged), followed by "free time" for personal hygiene and bodily maintenance, and mediation resumed at 7:30 a.m.

As per the daily schedule for this retreat, morning meditation ended at 10:30 a.m. for the daily dharma talk and lesson.  After completing three-and-a-half days of intensive meditation, my mind was quite still and quiet.  To the outside eye, I probably appeared "relaxed," but internally it felt less like a state of leisure than one of quiet acceptance of the world as it was at that moment, and separate and apart from my desires and expectations of things.  To be honest, I also was probably feeling a little bit smug, a self-congratulatory satisfaction that it appeared that I was going to make it through the crucial Day 4 of the retreat, and that I was therefore likely to make it all the way to the Day 7 finish line.  

The morning dharma talk usually began with a few announcements and program updates, such as afternoon work detail will be moved indoors today due to forecast rain, or a kind patron will be providing dinner this evening but it might be arriving a little later than usual.  Boring, insignificant little details like that. So imagine my surprise when the teacher announced that according to a bunch of emails and text messages he had received that morning, the United States was under terrorist attack and that we would be postponing the dharma talk and all other planned activities to allow the retreat participants to call home and make sure that family and loved ones were safe and out of harm's way.

Day 4 was on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

The violent events of the day probably seemed even more surreal from the calm, peaceful perspective of a Zen meditation retreat than it did to most other Americans as they followed the events on line or on television. The announcement seemed so unbelievable that it even occurred to me that it might be some sort of Zen trick, a test of our composure and equanimity, and I had to go sit in my car for a while and listen to A.M. news radio before I was convinced that it was all real, all too real.

As was suggested, I called home and made sure that family members in Boston were unaffected.  They were fine, although flight plans had been interrupted due to the grounding of the entire commercial airline fleet.  After a few hours of phone calls and radio confirmation, we all returned to the main building of the retreat center in time for the noontime meal.

We discussed whether to terminate the retreat so that everyone could go home and deal with whatever matters needed to be dealt with, including comforting family, friends, and significant others.  A few did just that, and left the retreat to head home, and we lost more participants than usual for a Day 4.  Others of us, including myself, lived alone and there was nothing really to accomplish by leaving, so about a half-dozen of us decided to stay and see the retreat through to Day 7, despite the horrific events of 9/11.  The teacher, who probably expected everyone to bail, seemed pleasantly surprised that we had chosen to stay, and sat with us through the rest of the retreat.

While everyone else in America, at least as I imagine, was watching video footage of the plane colliding with the World Trade Tower over and over again on television, listening to political commentary on CNN and over talk radio, and working themselves up into a patriotic and Islamophobic lather, I and a half-dozen like-minded others spent the days off the grid, practicing 10 to 12 hours a day of silent meditation, deepening our practice, and cultivating a sense of equanimity and loving-kindness.  The contrast between my state of mind and the world I encountered when I finally returned to work the next Monday morning could not have been more profound.

I had been spared exposure to all of the increasingly hysterical calls for revenge and the speculations of "why do they hate us?"  While I was at a point of maximal calmness and acceptance, I was in a nation busily and angrily preparing itself for war.  I couldn't have been more out of touch with the mood of the nation.  

I saw the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan as more or less inevitable. After the events of 9/11, someone's going to get bombed - America's going to go to war, like it or not, I reasoned.  At the time, I considered myself a generally apolitical "compassionate conservative," but I lost whatever support I had left for George W. Bush when he later invaded Iraq, a sovereign nation clearly unrelated to the terrorist attacks.  My disappointment in Bush and the two wars led to support in the next presidential election for Bush's opponent, John Kerry, and finally to a full-hearted embrace of progressive values and liberalism by the time Barack Obama ran for office in 2008.

Our Zen retreat did not include any patriotic ceremonies or other secular activities, and following that disorienting Day 4 discovery, we didn't talk much about what came to be known as 9/11, but it couldn't be avoided either.  The elephant in the room.  

Of the retreat participants who stayed until the end, one was a Colombian woman and another a younger, male student from France.  Fortunately for us, the two adopted the role of head chefs during the retreat. Once, while they were preparing the evening meal, I overheard them talking about the attack.

"The United States has to learn respect for the rights of other nations," the French student was saying.  "They can't keep crossing international borders on military expeditions into other lands."

"That's right," the Columbian woman agreed.  "It was just a matter of time before something like this occurred." And then she added, "I'm glad it happened."

Those would have been fighting words almost anywhere else in America at that time.  But hearing that argument then, my mind already in a still, peaceful place after so many days of mediation, I just let my own feelings go - there was nothing to be gained from jumping into the thorny thicket of international politics.  I asked if any vegetables needed chopping before dinner.