Prime Time - Jane Fonda [135]
During the talks, Joan spoke of what she referred to as nonduality, but I didn’t understand what that meant. Then, on the seventh day, as I was floating in that still void behind my forehead, the sixty people sitting as I was seemed to merge into a single energetic force that filled the hall. It wasn’t that I thought of this; it just was. For a fleeting moment I knew that everything—every thing—is part of an unbroken wholeness, constantly flowing and coherent. Tears poured down my cheeks. They tickled me. Joan had talked about this—not scratching when we itched, instead becoming the itch. I became my tears. I was beyond happy.
On the final day, we held council. All sixty of us, together with Joan and the other priests, sat in a circle, and each person spoke for a few minutes about what the eight days had meant for us. I learned that every one of us had been challenged in the mind-stilling department. As I heard the others describe their experiences and what had brought them there, all the “loser” labels melted away and all that was left was our shared, beautiful, fragile humanity. The poet Mary Lou Kownacki has written, “Is there anyone we wouldn’t love, if we only knew their story?” I’d been broken open.
It is hard to put words to what the experience at Upaya did to me and for me. But upon my return, I remembered a letter that my grandaunt Millicent Rogers had written to her son Paul prior to her death in 1953—it was he who’d given it to me. Millicent was my mother’s cousin, the daughter of Henry Huttleston Rogers, a cofounder of Standard Oil, and a woman of legendary style. Despite the fact that the Millicent Rogers Museum is in Taos, New Mexico, I had always avoided knowing about her because I wanted to disassociate myself from anything related to my mother and because I assumed Millicent was simply a fancy socialite. How wrong that assumption was! The opening paragraph of her letter showed me that she had attained, before her early death at age fifty-one, what it had taken me seventy years to begin to understand.
Darling Paulie,
Did I ever tell you about the feeling I had a little while ago? Suddenly passing Taos Mountain I felt that I was part of the earth, so that I felt the Sun on my Surface and the rain.
I felt the Stars and the growth of the Moon, under me rivers ran. And against me were the tides. The waters of rain sank into me. And I thought if I stretched out my hands they would be Earth and green would grow from me. And I knew that there was no reason to be lonely, that one was everything, and Death was as easy as the rising sun and as calm and natural—that to be enfolded in Earth was not an end but part of oneself, part of every day and night that we lived, so that being part of the Earth one was never alone. And all fear went out of me—with a great, good stillness and strength.
PHOTO BY JUSTIN MARCEL LUBIN
I set the letter down and marveled that I hadn’t read it until my return from Upaya, when I was totally open to her words. I wondered if my ancestor Millicent hadn’t been holding my hand as I’d made my inner journey. Maybe she’s why I have ended up spending so much time in New Mexico. Seekers and sages say that we all have councils of elders guiding us from the other side.
I can’t pretend to carry the non-sticky, non-dual mind with me day to day, but I have begun a regular practice of meditation, and sometimes, when I reach that still intersection, it comes back to me. I can tell from my interactions with people and when I speak publicly that I manifest a different energy, one that encourages an easy give-and-take, often on a soul level—even with strangers. Dr. Laura Carstensen, founding director