At the writing retreat, they made me hold the talking stick. We were in a circle. There was incense. I was the youngest by at least 10 years. There was a lot of menopause in the air. I had paid $100. They said it would help me get in touch with my soul. They said it would unleash the creative spirit so often stamped down by what society would like us to call “reality.” They said it would be a fascinating day of self-exploration and group bonding, that I would experience “the sublime and the unexpected.”
They were wrong. It was boring and lame.
I love women. I adore women. The thought of getting to spend all day writing and reflecting and meditating with a new batch of women seemed delightful. I wanted to restore my soul and all that shit. I love writing. I adore writing. I love the ocean. I adore the ocean. It was near the ocean.
But for some crazy reason, in this case, women + writing + oceanside retreat = the dullest dull day. Actually, the ocean part was cool. And I got to draw with pastels. But when I had to do an interpretive dance about my feelings, I almost lost my shit laughing. When they said, “Your dance…might simply be internal!” I agreed that my dance was, indeed, internal. I laid down on the floor for eight minutes, and the woman who was “mirroring” me in order to “affirm” my “sense of self” did the same.
I love hippie shit. I adore it. But this was something else altogether. I am a sensitive, caring, loving soul and I’m a great listener, but when the woman across the circle from me started sobbing about how her “feminine wisdom was raped by the patriarchy!” I found, for the first time in my life, that I wanted to laugh uproariously at a sentence involving a conjugation of the verb “to rape.” And that, my friends, was unexpected.
Oh shit! Amazing. I think this may be the beginning of a fork in the road in which you turn your back on hippie bullshit.
You are SO 1976.
Especially some of your hurr-don’ts from whence you was yungur.
Ironic that a bunch of women needed to hold a stick in order to feel powerful enough to speak, eh? Perhaps feminine wisdom raped itself the “talking stick” that day.
There was so much metaphorical rape in that room, Anne, I can’t begin to describe it. The incense definitely raped my olfactory sense.
You could use the word ‘adore’ little less. It will be less meaningful with time . You can’t adore everything that you like.
what were you looking when you went to there? meet women?
I found this entry while looking up the phrase “journal is not a verb” on google*. One of my pet peeves. I am writing up some stuff about why, how the usage got started (I bet it was Progoff) and so forth.
All my self-realization stuff is done solo — I am too shy to do well with groups of any kind — but I worked as a card reader in a New Age bookstore for a year or so, and they had all different discussion and meditation groups. So I am kind of interested in what could have been different about this gathering from the others you attended. Have you been to retreats since that were better?
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*”Google” is not a verb either.
Wait, so at what point were journals involved?