Thursday, May 8, 2008

Re-entry can be tough

I just got back from a 5-day meditation retreat. It was a wonderful weekend, but it's always a little tricky to come back to "normal" life after spending five days sitting quietly, often blissfully out in nature. 

The first night back, my dad asked how the weekend had been. I described this phenomenon to him, and he replied that "you gotta come back to reality sometime." Immediately it hit me that this - drinking beer in front of the tv - seemed less like reality to me than communing with nature and divine wisdom does. I simply responded that I felt the weekend wasn't in any way an escape from reality, but just a different experience of it. 

Because really, this is his reality. Everyone has their own reality - whatever you are experiencing in any given moment is your reality in that moment. It's just that reality changes depending on your state or your beliefs. 

That brief interaction did give me pause, though. Before people created our current, generally accepted "reality" - before they invented governments and democracies and commerce and religion and all of those self-imposed structures that define life for most of us - there were people, and there was nature, and there was Spirit. I'm not going to judge what is more or less "real," "better," or "natural," I'm just going to reiterate my statement to my dad that to me, the meditation isn't an escape or a fake reality, it's simply a different expression and experience of it. 

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