Notes from the Cave

The “cave” is a chamber built into the hillside, underground, in a high valley north of Santa Fe, a spot far from other human habitations. It has been a place for solo meditation retreats for a decade or two, sometimes used regularly, sometimes left alone for long stretches.

I have been blessed by the generosity of the owners of that valley, who have invited me to go up there for solo multi-day retreats several times over recent years.

What follows are some reflections from my stays up there.

Up at the cave again. It’s known as the cave but basically it’s an underground bermed chamber, with a big window-door at the front, so you have a view across the valley.

It’s built on one steep side of a valley at 9,500 ft of elevation, under tall ponderosa pines. If you lie down in front you can see the trees meeting high over your head, each crown attached to a very tall trunk. Like the spokes of a wheel overhead.

I’m starting to feel, more often, just how still and quiet the forest is. The mountains are a place for quiet. The immensity will, in the end, silence the mind.

I’ve been more exhausted than I realized, and finally, perhaps, glimmers of true wakefulness are starting to show through the murk.

But I let the murk be. I don’t fight it. I doze, daydream, rest, in and out of sleep, sometimes vivid brief hypnagogic dreams, images. Often just a blankness.

It’s my third day up here now. The foretold snow may be starting to arrive. It comes in bursts of a few minutes then ceases.

Then a bigger, ampler, fuller, swifter snowfall comes. Thick, mealy, and full flakes. And beyond, down in the valley proper, a fleet horizontal sideways current of thick snow. It comes like a cloud, turning the far valley side misty, gauzy, as if seen through swift-flowing fog.

Ah, I think, so this is really it. The snow has arrived. There’ll be the promised 11 inches.

I sink back into meditation, eyes closed, finding a spell of clear peace. Again, I sense what it is to be in the high forest. It’s a grace. The forest, and the mountains it lives on, exist in a high land of silence and peace. You only find their land when you too go still and quiet.

Then for a little while you can join them, and catch a glimpse of what they really are, a kind of holiness, actually a greater, truer holiness than any you could find in a cathedral or synagogue or temple. They have the true peace that religions seek to manufacture. They are that truth.

Anyway, next thing I know, it’s the end of the sitting period, and the snow has stopped again. The sun is out. So much for my attempts to read what’s going on with the weather.

It’s lovely being here. I feel I’m learning something. Partly, learning again what it is to live with a “broad margin to my life,“ as Thoreau called it. With a great bank account of time. With a sense of time that it may as well be infinitely expansive. When you have that sense of time, it doesn’t matter if your time is up all too soon.

It doesn’t matter because you know you have found the truth of time: that it’s an impostor.

And the other thing I’m learning again is that when there’s a broad bank of time, it holds the flow of your true life. Your life doesn’t dissipate in a hundred small side sluices. The true current flows. It carries you. You know you’re in it, the right stream.

And a third thing I’m relearning: with a broad bank of time, and the true current, it’s as if there’s just one right thing to do. Pay attention. Notice the many small things. The little bird sitting in a dip in the pine needles outside the window, fluttering itself as if in a bird bath.

And the way the little gang of mountain blue jays occasionally flies in, and they take up specific positions in the ponderosas, and fly in dead straight lines deliberately among them. Like soccer players doing deliberate straight passes midfield.

And the way the ponderosas nearby seem to have hands, which they keep shaking. But across the valley the ponderosas stand in their serried ranks absolutely motionless. Yet the same wind breathes through both sides. Yet the nearer side waves, the farther is so still.

It’s these little things that constitute a good life. How do you know? You feel it when you know it. You know it when you feel it. You can’t miss it.

This holiness in the mountains – and of the mountains – it’s a true holiness because it’s not manufactured by humans. It’s free of human ideas. Even the word “holy” should not be misconstrued as encouraging an idea of what holy means.

I’m using it just as shorthand, a cipher, to represent the absence of ideas – a pure, uncluttered, unoccluded wonder, that the mountains and the light in its slow-motion play are displaying.

It’s idea-free. Perhaps it is the very absence of ideas, the purging of all ideas, that reveals this holiness.

✨ Thanks for reading this week’s note. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to download and explore my meditation app: The Way. The Way is different to other meditation apps. You’re not inundated with choices and options – just one pathway of training, guiding you deeper and deeper into the healing and awakening power of meditation.

I also want to encourage you to browse my Events Calendar to see if there’s an online event you’d like to join, or if I’m coming to a city near you for a meditation retreat.