Retreat

There is a beautiful gazebo across from our yard. Everyone who visits comments on the beauty of this gazebo. They ask who owns it and how often they use it. No one ever uses the gazebo. It was intended as a spiritual retreat. It is a retreat for the groundhogs I chase from my garden. Today, though, I saw a brilliant orange passing through the trees and into the gazebo. Our neighbor’s relatives are in from Laos for a wedding. One, a monk, found his way to the gazebo. It made me realize that quiet rest and contemplation are practices. They take practice.

What the duck?

Ducks gather by the crick running through my back yard like travelers gather by the pool at a resort. Only the ducks are not vacationing. They are being ducks. I wish I were a duck. 

I saw the remains of a duck by the side of the road, torn to pieces by something. I guess that is the price you pay for sitting by the water all day instead of building walls around yourself.

The other day I sat looking at the gathered ducks. There were three distinct groups. Since most of the female ducks are sitting on nests, the largest group consisted of lone males, glistening green at the top like bottles of champagne. One male sat off from the group with a female duck. I have heard that ducks mate for life, and this site filled me with romantic thoughts of my partner with his own fancifully feathered head. The third ‘grouping’ was a single duck – female. She sat alone between the others. Separate. I look at her and imagine the blanket of feathers and duck parts by the side of the road. I wonder if she lost her mate.

I wondered about the ducks. I like to think the single-mate notion has merit in nature outside of human invention. But does their social life mirror our own in any other way? Does the male duck sitting with his partner feel disappointed to be separated from the other males? Does the female partner feel guilt for the nature of partnership? Is she infertile? Does she feel guilty about that? Does the lone female feel lonely? Does she look at the partnered female with envy? Does she hate the other female? Does she hate herself without a mate to give her some reason not to? Do the males sitting in a group ever get tempted? Do they look longingly at the smooth brown feathers of both the partnered and widowed female duck while their own mates sit on nests, hatching their progeny? Or are they just ducks? 

Why can't we just say "easel"?

The words we unconsciously use reflect the society we have constructed. The words we chose can dismantle that society by making thought conscious again. 

Working Habits

Life is so prescribed, and increasingly so with age. There is an order to my day forged by centuries of civilization. To lose yourself to it is, simply, to lose yourself. A habitualized life maintains the status quo. The concept of seizing the day isn’t about being a go-getter at work; going above and beyond the call of civilized duty. It is about awakening to choice; to the opportunities in every moment to make your own way. This is very difficult to do in civilized society. It is impossible to do in a cubicle. 

An Integrative Life

For my birthday I received two bracelets – one with beads from Turkey, and one spun from grass. Looking down at my wrists was a strong visual of the ongoing tension I feel between exploring the world and setting deep roots to land and community. The tension is punctuated by my partner’s departure for Nepal in a week and our visit to a sheep farm last month. The idea of each path titillates me as I punch out a life in suburbia. But I strongly believe in living an integrative life. I know what it is to trek through Nepal, even though I have never been there. I know the stimulation of new sights, sounds, smells, tastes, oh how I love the tastes. I know the hospitality of others. I know the richness of new cultures. But life happens now. And right now, I can show that hospitality. I can incorporate rich traditions into my own day with incense and gongs and hugs and generosity. I can see and hear and smell and taste things anew with mindfulness. Likewise, I can know and care about what is in my backyard. I can experience the elements in an acre lot. I can work my body and grow my food and wash my clothes. I can invest in my community and get to know those around me and share life in little ways. I’m not saying I wont eventually follow a path to the Turkish beads or spun grass. I have heard that those who are faithful with little will be given much. But the much in my hands right now is this living moment wherein I can integrate where I have been and where I am now.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a

raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore

and then run?

Does it stink like rotten meant?

Or curst and sugar over

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sages

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

--Langston Hughes

Debunking Perfection

I exposed my stomach the other day, and not accidently.


For ten years I have taken every precaution to hide my stomach. I had an agreement that when it looked a certain way I would let it see the sun again. But for ten years my ribs or curves or pesky belly-button hair has broken the terms of this agreement.


The other day when I went swimming in my sports bra, it was not because my torso took on an eerily Halle Berry quality. In fact, I weigh more this year than ever before, and the bulk of that weight seems to have manifested in my gut (a very unfortunate predicament for a 27-year-old who has been married for 5-years and has the eager attention of countless eyes on her baby-growing parts).


And so it was time. It was time to remove a cloak and attempt to debunk this myth that anything less than perfect must be hidden, or that there is perfection because anything less is never shared and seen.


It was difficult to so nakedly expose my imperfection; to take that imagined blow to my image. In fact, I regret it. But I hope to do it again.

Renee the anarchist

What do you get when you mix a police officer and a teacher? A very legalistic daughter.
I have worked very hard my entire life to follow the letter of the law and avoid disappointing figures of authority. But my accumulating years have emboldened me, and I have become a bit of a rogue. One 'rule' I have begun to blatantly disregard is (prepare yourself...) "Do not walk on the grass". This was a hard one to break, not only because I am always afraid somone will yell at me (In my all-too-well socialized mind, there is always some authority figure hiding behind every corner in my life, waiting to jump out and humiliate me with flashing lights or a banging gavel or a raised voice), but also because my entire life I felt as though tramping across grass simply to get somewhere more quickly was (1) lazy, (2) a criminal act against the living grass, and (3) disrespectful to those who tended the lawns. For a long time, this rule fit nicely in my understanding of right and moral conduct. In college, I learned that large numbers of people walking on the ground would push down the soil and make it more difficult for things to grow. But what I have come to realize is - it's grass! And barely! This stuff with which the college campus near my house is adorned chokes out life. And the chemicals and gasoline that go into its maitenance is appaling. I agree that the land beneath it is valuable. If I had any hope that the college would utilize it more responsibly, I would respect their pathways and rules. I have no hope.

Another rule that has come to mean very little to me is, "No littering". It is strange that my increasing environmentalism leads me to disagree with a rule like this. I am a child of the 80's, and raised in a flood of Earth Day, Save the Rainforest, and Captain Planet. What I did not understand about society's embracing of environmentalism was that it is mostly aestetic. Why not litter? We create so much trash in the united states, but it is invisible to most of us! Why not clutter our lives with reality until we are moved to create true change?