All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [63]
Well, that deflates my angst. That’s like someone telling me, when I’m on a diet, that dark molten chocolate cake has no calories; it suddenly makes no difference whether I eat it all right away or not. Once I give myself permission to go have a beer, it loses its urgent appeal. I am no longer defying an authority I presumed was there, going against the rules just because I hate rules in general. I have a free choice. So I decide it is getting kind of late for a beer if I want to get back in time for the dharma talk this evening, and I can go tomorrow instead.
I don’t leave the next day or the rest of the ten days, which go by surprisingly fast. Instead of hating being silent for all that time, which all of my friends thought would be impossible for such a chatty raconteuse, I feel profoundly relieved that for the first time since I was a toddler I don’t have to speak. If I said anything to anyone I’d feel I had to entertain them, tell them a story, give them a favorable impression of myself, put them at ease, flirt, tell them where I live and what I do for a living, and then have to explain that yes, sometimes you come up with story ideas yourself and sometimes the magazine calls you, and no, generally you do not submit the same story to a lot of different magazines at once. I am free to be anonymous and observe, like being in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language. You’re just there, your most simple, reliable self.
I get into a rhythm with meditating. I don’t go to all the sessions, respecting my limits and restlessness; I ditch one session a day to do yoga, which I figure is almost as good as meditating, and another to hike on the trails, which is perhaps better. On one of those walks, I encounter a rattlesnake, notice his lovely pattern, say, “Hello there, feller,” to his flicking face, and keep on walking while he slithers into the grass. That’s when I know all this meditation is having a seriously calming effect. Ordinarily, I’d have to be loaded on benzodiazepines to see a rattlesnake without screaming, having heart palpitations, and bursting into a sour sweat.
The last rattlesnake I ran into, for instance, was quite a different story. It was dusk on the day my ex-husband proposed to me, and we were taking a walk in the La Sal Mountains above Moab. My new fiancé asked me if I had any fears; every time in our relationship when we’d come clean with our fears, we’d ended up feeling closer. He said he was afraid that since he’d been abandoned as a kid, he might do the same thing to me or even abandon his own child if we had one, which we were planning to do. I reassured him that his fears were normal and unfounded. Abandon me? I could never imagine him doing that. Then he asked me about my fears, and I told him I didn’t have any. Just at that moment I heard a distinctive, dry rattle. There, two feet from my left foot, thick as a fire hose, a rattlesnake was coiled up, warning to strike. I screamed and ran. When he caught up with me, my fiancé, who knew I was terrified of snakes, instead of comforting me, admonished me that I shouldn’t have jumped, it was stupid, because snakes will jump right after you. I later thought of that snake as a sort of warning sign, an omen from the universe, and even if that sign was hard to read, my fiancé’s lack of care and comfort—not to mention his warning that he’d abandon me—was not.
So now I’ve managed to stay calm, which has to be a good omen.
Toward the end of the silent retreat, I begin to feel as if I have an altered sense of awareness of everything around me. After I finish reading one novel I don’t start any of the five others I’ve brought, not wanting to take myself out of the experience anymore but instead trying to stay in a state of constant mindfulness that feels a little like being on acid—noticing everything