For each of us as women, there is a deep place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises…. Within these deep places, each one holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.
Audre Lorde
The woman who is virgin, one-in-herself, does what she does—not because of any desire to please, not to be liked, or to be approved, even by herself…but because what she does is true.
Esther Harding, Woman’s Mysteries
When I started my research, I thought I knew what a retreat was. But as I conducted interviews and read books, my idea kept broadening and shifting. The continuum of retreat experiences was so wide, the content and mode of retreats were amazingly varied, and the history of women on retreat stretched to the beginnings of human culture. I was enthralled by images of women at the ancient descent of the Thesmophoria in Greece. I found myself exhilarated by stories of women on arduous wilderness retreats. Rereading Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton made me want to go live alone, preferably in Maine. Stories about the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich’s life as an anchoress made my small office, where I retreat daily, seem spacious, especially because the door opened. Pondering the literary and artistic accomplishments of George Sand, Emily Dickinson, Georgia O’Keeffe, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, and others amazed me. These were accomplishments made possible only because, going directly against the grain of society, these women lived in retreat. Talking to Buddhist women about three-month silent retreats conjured awe and terror in my heart. Recalling the “No Boys Allowed” clubhouse and indoor tents scrabbled together from dining room chairs and quilts brought back childhood memories of retreat.
The idea of retreat kept expanding. Is solitude important? Is solitude alone a retreat? Do you have to be silent? Do you have to meditate? Must you be serious? Do you have to be in pain or in crisis? Must you leave your home? Do you need to fast? Is only a whole day or week or month a real retreat? Do three hours count? Three minutes? I became more and more confused, uncertain how to help women create a retreat experience for themselves. What makes a retreat a retreat? I searched for the common threads among women’s experiences, both historical and literary, as well as ones I gathered through interviews.
Then it struck me. My title. The Woman’s Retreat Book. Why a woman’s retreat? What distinguishes a woman’s retreat? Why had I been drawn to write only to women?
After writing and reading and agitating for six months, one afternoon it came together. A woman’s retreat springs from and is guided by a woman’s inner knowing. A woman’s retreat is about stepping out of your ordinary existence to listen and attune to your truest, most authentic self. It is about being self-referenced to become self-restored. It is about trusting what you experience as sacred without the need for external sanction. It is setting apart time to tend the hearth of your inner life, feed your muse, reclaim your dreams. A place to reaffirm your values by giving yourself permission to do what you need when you need it, not when you think you should or when someone else thinks you should. About using loving self-discipline to push past limiting beliefs, to instigate change, to bring closure.
Cycles
Each of us has a personal periodic, an internal tide, an instinctual cyclical rhythm that alternates between an accomplishing, energetic, doing time in which you engage with the world, dig ditches, get degrees, bake your ideas, and sell them and a retreating, reflective, being time in which you detach from the world, stare out the window at the rain, plant fat spring bulbs, and breast-feed your imagination. When we do not value or attend to the retreating cycle as much as we do the accomplishing cycle, we betray our basic rhythm and risk becoming walking zombies, with no life to speak of. We have not allowed time to replenish our inner world. As May Sarton wrote in Journal of a Solitude, to do without solitude “is even worse”:
I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over any encounter, and to extract its juices, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.
Right now, too few of us are tending to our cycle of being, of going within. We are suffering from hambre del alma, a starving soul. By not recognizing and feeding our longing for retreat, by not declaring “I need to do nothing” or “I need to knit or clean my closet or simply be alone,” we diminish ourselves. By believing that if we take time for ourselves, our kids will starve, the cat will die, or our company will go bankrupt, we starve our lives into efficient skeletons. One question almost always presents the biggest obstacle: Do I believe I am worthy of a retreat? Is all this fuss necessary? Can’t I just take a pill?
You, me, each of us must value the retreating, going-within cycle as much as the accomplishing, out-in-the-world cycle. Can you believe that being alone for a day is as important as going to work? Do you dare believe that making retreat a regular part of your life is as important as making a million dollars?
To come to this new belief we must learn the value in retreating. We must discover firsthand how solitude can allow us to locate our juice, our authenticity. Marion Woodman noted in her interview in The Feminine Face of God,
One of the problems women have today is that they are not willing to find the river in their own life and surrender to its current. They are not willing to spend time discovering themselves, because they feel they are being selfish. They grow up trying to please other people and they rarely ask themselves, who am I? Rarely. And then life starts to feel meaningless because they live in terms of pleasing, rather than in terms of being who they are.
Since I was little, I have imagined canoeing down the underground river, the aquifer that runs under northern Florida. Finding the river of your life is as mysterious and mythical as imagining. To locate our personal rivers we must be willing, as Kim Chernin writes in her book Reinventing Eve, to “peel back layer after layer of pretense, compliance, and accommodation so that I could stand naked before myself as a woman.”
Finding your river is a subtle and maddening undertaking, like trying to shape iron with tweezers. It is also terrifying work, for it requires surrender. Not only do you have to dig underground to find the water (which many of us believe does not exist), but you also have to jump into that murky water and swim! My friend Jeanie asked, “Why are you calling it a retreat? What are you running away from?” Finding your own underground river means running away from the external, “the torrent of daily have-tos,” as my sister-in-law Diana names it. It is a running toward yourself, toward a place (it can be both internal and external) of seclusion, privacy, and contemplation.
We can see this in Kim Chernin’s account of her own initiatory retreat in Reinventing Eve. She was bored and restless, depressed and despondent, and she had driven up into the mountains above Dublin, stopping at an old estate she had never visited before.
An old man came out of the gatehouse; he was surprised to see me, touched his finger to his cap, showed me the bell on the gate. A scrappy dog growled and came toward me, tugging at his rope. I had several cookies in my pocket. I threw one to him…. The gate swung back a few feet; I walked through and turned to wave at the old man, who locked it behind me…. From the moment the old man disappeared into the gatehouse again I felt a panic of loneliness…. I wanted to run back to the car and head out for Dublin….
She went forward with her walk and experienced a transcendent time out of time in which she grasped that nature, “which I’d always imaged as a brute force, had some kind of vivid life to it.” She had to face a question: was it possible that her rational worldview, “everything I had been told about the universe was simply an assumption, a style of perception, rather than truth?”
It was too late to flee from the place. I, the rationalist, was in the grip of extreme emotion. I could fight it off, run away, or surrender and find out what it meant. I found myself before an immense tree. Near the bottom it had been split almost in two by lightning and in the charred, concave base, a brilliant green-and-yellow lichen was growing. I stared at the tree, a natural altar. I tried to distract myself with this thought and meanwhile my body was doing something peculiar. I noticed it, thought I should fight it, was doing it anyway. Then it was done. There I was, on the ground in front of the tree. Tears streaming down my face. I, raised in a family of Marxist atheists, down on my knees, worshipping?
Chernin’s story is echoed again and again in women’s stories of retreat. Separated from what is normal, we are brought to our knees before all that is holy and meaningful.
We may retreat for many reasons throughout our lives, to reflect on our lives, to celebrate our wisdom, to mourn, to create, to recuperate, but the underlying one is to recontact our purpose in life. Life becomes dull and meaningless not because of what we are doing but because we don’t know why we are doing it, because it has no resonance with our inner world. “I believe what a women resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly. What we fear is not so much that our energy may be leaking away through small outlets as that it may be going ‘down the drain,’” wrote Anne Morrow Lindbergh in 1955 in Gift from the Sea. “Every person, especially every woman, should be alone sometime during the year, some part of each week, and each day. How revolutionary that sounds….”
A retreat is the restorative by which you walk away from being a woman who exists only in relationship to others and walk toward a self that relishes and enjoys her relationships because she has a strong center from which to relate. Creating your own retreat allows you to encounter your deepest needs, feelings, and impulses away from the voices and needs of others.
But here we get trapped in the feminine crucible. Here is the place where the social messages about what makes a good woman, the economic realities, the inner beliefs of worth, and the family responsibilities meet the call to retreat with a heart-wrenching, forward-momentum-stopping crash. A retreat simply feels impossible to do. For some of us, even an hour alone in the bathtub feels like a hopeless desire. It can take massive amounts of courage to believe that you must have time to muse, to fling open your dusty hope chest crammed with notions, recollections, fancies. To picture your future. To pore over and release the past. To retreat. “Women are, by nature, disposed to relationship and connectedness; yet true relationship cannot be embraced until a woman has a deep sense of her at-one-ment. Without this essential independence from all roles and bonds, she is a potential victim for servitude,” Marion Woodman cautions in her book Dancing in the Flames, co-written with Elinor Dickson. To be connected with and to nurture others is a precious, delightful, integral part of our lives. We are constantly giving in a personal and emotional way. We want to do so, some of us must do so, but we also must take time to be in solitude, to find and tend our selves, or we risk becoming ensnared in a tyranny of relationships, unable to locate our authentic core. When this happens, we risk losing not only the meaning in our lives but our very selves, the deep-rooted, innermost knowledge of who we are and why we are here.
It often takes massive amounts of courage to take that first step.
I cannot give you that courage, although as I write this I imagine incandescent energy and fortitude shooting directly into your heart. I imagine performing a Vulcan mind meld to convince you in the most visceral way of how important it is to take this time, not once in your life, not once a year, but as often as your life cycle demands. I have lived in my own deserted spirit and have seen the devastation that comes from staying too long in the accomplishment/pleasing others/hoping-to-be-good-enough mode. Cantadora Clarissa Pinkola Estés, in Women Who Run with the Wolves, describes it this way:
See Courage.
There is a quality of mourning to it all. There is angst. There is a feeling of loss, of being bereft. There is wistfulness. There is a longing. There is plucking at threads in one’s skirt and staring long from windows. And it is not a temporary discomfort. It stays, and grows more and more intense with time.
You can put on your coat, pick up your purse, and say as you shut the door, “You’ll be fine without me.” Go. Claim your right. Forget waiting for permission. Carve out the time. Notice I do not say find the time. That is an absurd and dangerous phrase. Time is never lying around waiting for us to find her. She is elusive. She wants you to sculpt her like clay, to mold her into exactly the form you desire your days to take. If you refuse to do that, if you spend your mornings worrying and your afternoons catering to others, always hoping there will be a few minutes left for you, time will play you like a sucker, making you run harder and faster with each passing week. Time wants you to realize that she is the most precious and irreducible fact of your life. Make her into what you will.
A New Path
Creating a self-led retreat can be frightening. There is no prescribed path to follow. I give a bare beginning here with suggestions and ideas, but you must make your own way because that is what is required to meet your authenticity. Am I suggesting we discard all the other retreat traditions, from Zen Buddhist to Benedictine—ancient traditions based on obedience and discipline? No, what I am proposing is that we need our own path, our own way to slow down, go within, and listen, a way that is germane to our lives and is created through our women’s understanding. When I learned that obey and listen are etymologically related, I realized that what I am proposing isn’t so radical, even from a traditional view. I am asking you to obey: to listen to and obey your own heart.
What Do You Need a Book For?
If a woman’s retreat springs from and is guided by your inner knowing, why do you need this book?
I remember being on my first self-led retreat and not getting anything out of it because I didn’t know what to do with my time. I took myself away to my friend Mary’s bed-and-breakfast in Inverness, California. I brought with me a vague desire, several excellent books to work with, and my journal, and I was in one of my favorite places. My experience had moments of beauty and relaxation, highlighted by watching seals in a cove and having dinner with Mary. Repeating to myself “I am on retreat” was comforting and made the time feel somewhat shining and extraordinary, but it wasn’t enough. I didn’t know how to move deeper. I kept asking myself, “What do I do next?” I was plagued by guilt, boredom, and confusion. My time apart lacked the intensity and purity that I had experienced before in organized group retreats. I was disappointed and not renewed.
I didn’t retreat on my own again for years. It felt kind of pointless.
Sometimes it is enough simply to go away by yourself and listen. But often you need some guidelines, an outline to refer to, a framework to build within, an alchemical vessel into which to pour your self for generous simmering. The longer we have been out of contact with our truest selves—the busier we have been, the more wrapped up in other people’s lives—the harder it is to slow down and be with ourselves. The purpose of this book is to provide one way to begin doing just that.
The Archetypal Pattern
Retreats have been with us since the very beginning of humanity. From menstruating women living apart in huts to the biblical Ruth and Judith to anchoresses walled into a room to Emily Dickinson to Georgia O’Keeffe to Annie Dillard, there is a history, albeit slim and barely recorded (when compared to the sagas of men on retreat), of women alone, women turning within.
The first retreat took place when menstruating women separated from the rest of the tribe. The reason menstruating women first separated was probably for survival, hiding in trees and caves from animals who smelled their blood. Why, after this was no longer necessary, did the cross-cultural practice of ritual menstrual seclusion persist? The reason was certainly not to give women time alone. Nonetheless, over hundreds of thousands of years, alongside our emerging consciousness, grew the idea of women alone, women outside of ordinary space and time: the retreat archetype.
We can readily detect this elementary pattern’s three parts: ritual separation, liminal space (on the threshold, a timeless, in-between place), and return.
First there is ritual separation. One of the meanings of the Sanskrit word r’tu, which translates as “ritual,” is menstruation. Menstruation gave us ritual. Through ritual, menstruating women were taken out of ordinary tribal life. The ritual signified that an essential shift in consciousness was occurring, which is the purpose of retreat. Ritual enabled women to separate their minds from their everyday responsibilities. Ritual separation caused women to step out of profane space and time and into a secret, set-apart world: betwixt and between, liminal space, time out of time.
Menstrual seclusion often wasn’t comfortable; some tribes bound girls in a hammock and hung them above the ground for days or even weeks; others covered women in dirt up to their necks. Yet the often extreme conditions—the most universal taboos being that women could not see the light or touch water or themselves—forced women to focus inward, giving us the second part of the pattern, a way to listen to the innermost self. Notes therapist Marcie Telander,
That’s the way to focus attention for the human animal. Sensory deprivation (which can also mean sensory overload) tricks the outer attention into focusing. Everyday attention can’t focus us in the same way. Placing your attention on a stone, mandala, stream, candle, baby’s face, flower, cat, helps to exclude the internal voices and pressures and turn you inward to what you are knowing.
Not allowed to participate in ordinary life, women were compelled to enter liminal time, the betwixt-and-between world where time and ordinary life are suspended. They are neither one thing nor another, neither who they were before nor who they will be after they emerge. They focused their attention by memorizing tribal history, by gathering herbal knowledge, by learning to weave baskets, or simply by being still.
The third piece of the pattern is the return to ordinary space and time. When the menstruating woman left the hut, it was with acknowledgment of her changed status, often through “a feast with relatives and friends, who made offerings to ancestors and spirits, as well as a number of rites similar to those for weddings,” notes poet and cultural historian Judy Grahn in Blood, Bread, and Roses.
Here is the archetype, as old as human consciousness. Here are the elements you can reenact, alone and with others, to enable you to separate your minds from others, to sanctify your time for a larger purpose.
Intention and ritual separation thrust you into the betwixt-and-between space. Focusing the senses through various means allows you to maintain that space and hear the still, small voice of your wisdom.
Conscious return to ordinary time integrates what you learned through listening by acknowledging that your consciousness has shifted, enlarged. You have been changed.
Archetypal Herstory
Looking at a few examples from prehistory, we find the archetype being cultivated. The Thesmophoria was a three-day women’s festival of rebirth, dating from at least 6000 B.C.E. and maybe much later. In Uncursing the Dark, Betty DeShong Meador tells the story of this ritual:
The ritual of Thesmophoria begins with three days of preparation, during which the women observe rites of purification…. The women abstain from sexual intercourse…. Thus they begin their withdrawal from men. In their houses, the women sleep alone…. They begin to enter wholly into the femaleness of themselves. They eat garlic to repel the men by the unappetizing smell of their breath…. At dusk on each of the three preparatory days, the women gather at the chosen fields…. There they build the huts in which they will sleep….
On the first day of the ritual, the menstruating women “carry down into a chasm newborn suckling pigs” and sacrifice them to the snake deity by slitting the pigs’ bellies. They then carry up rotting pig flesh (no one has adequately explained how the flesh rotted in less than a day). On the second day they mix the rotted pig flesh with seed, make “images from cereal paste and carry them down in baskets into the chasm,” fast in silence while sitting on the ground bleeding, and at night have a kind of tribal encounter group in which “what has been tolerated, ignored, hidden is exposed. The shouting exposes secrets, shatters pride, levels the women to a common ground.” On the third day, each woman buries the seed-flesh in the newly plowed fields, and together they sing praises to the snake deity before returning home.
While I’m not suggesting you visit a farmer and bring yourself home a little piglet for your next retreat or eat a lot of garlic to discourage your partner (“Just go. I can’t stand the smell anymore!”), this ancient ritual does apply to modern life. We cringe at the sacrifice of little piggies. Perhaps the sacrifice symbolically represents what we each must do to carve out time for retreat, how difficult it is for us to extricate ourselves. “She sacrifices the claims of family, children, village…. She acts out of a vision beyond the habits of caring, beyond the safe structures of society,” as Betty Meador interprets it. The Thesmophoria also illustrates the descent into the parts of ourselves we would rather not see and the descent into mystery, into letting go of control, expectations, and outcome.
Before a woman of our time can…realize her creative powers, she must participate in the downgoing. She must gather herself together. She must remove herself from the ongoing of her daily life. She must descend into the chasm.
Women on retreat, even mini-retreats of a few hours, often experience a feeling of descent. It is an integral part of the process. It forces us to stay fresh and humble, to disassociate with our overachieving, perfectionistic side, and to embrace our limitations. This is often the initiation that we must survive before we can hear and feel authentically. The Thesmophoria shows us that for nine thousand years women momentarily cut away the tethers of connection and descended into their darkness and returned reborn. If they could do it, so can we. And we don’t even have to sink our hands into rotted pig flesh.
In countless times and places of prehistory we can picture women retreating. No one knows how the vast underground temples (more than thirty) on the islands of Gozo and Malta in the Mediterranean (ca. 3500–2500 B.C.E.) were used. Perhaps they were used for religious rites, burial, even grain storage—no one knows exactly. Yet from descriptions of the ruins, it is easy to imagine women on retreat within these shrines. The Hypogeum is the most spectacular of the sanctuaries on Malta. Imagine six thousand square meters of inter-locking egg-shaped chambers, a main hall with vaulted ceiling and highly polished ochre-stained walls, chapels, burial rooms, and a room with a hole in the wall. When you speak into this hole, your voice echoes throughout the entire Hypogeum. It is speculated that people came to rest and be healed within the Hypogeum and to hear a priestess in the form of Oracle divine for them, perhaps through interpreting their dreams. Scholars believe it is quite possible that priestesses went to Malta to be schooled in the divine arts. Perhaps for thousands of years, female shamans and priestesses secluded themselves in such temples, and before that in the forest and in caves, to be alone and to receive wisdom they could use for others.
Imagine an opening ceremony that includes passing over a huge threshold adorned with a giant spiral into an inner sanctuary lit by oil lamps, where you are greeted by priestesses trained to help you relax and prepare to hear your own wisdom. Feel yourself curling up in one of those egglike chambers, literally held by the earth, your senses restricted to the sound of your own heartbeat. What would it feel like? What might you learn?
The Cost and the Struggle
Moving into recorded history, we could find countless examples of the archetype being evoked. But perhaps the most stunning is the medieval tradition of the anchoress. This piece of history does more than show us an extreme version of retreat. It illustrates the immense struggle we have endured to be alone. The history of women on retreat, women in solitude, is also the history of women struggling for autonomy. You cannot relax and listen to your deepest self, let alone transcend that self as the great contemplatives have counseled, if you don’t have a life of your own in the first place. For almost all of recorded history, women have not had the freedom, opportunity, income, time, or energy to learn to read and write, let alone to go off and ruminate in some cave. Being alone, especially living alone, got us ridiculed (“old maid”), exiled from the relatively safe life of our father’s house or marriage, thrown in prison, or even killed.
There are glimpses of women on retreat in early patriarchal history. Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson in Dancing in the Flames offer an example from Hellenic times:
It was not until Hera finally decided that she had had enough of Zeus’s promiscuity that things began to change. She left Zeus and returned to her birthplace in Euboea. In aloneness she came to terms with her own essential oneness.
It is also told that Hera bathed ritually in the ocean each year to renew her virginity, her at-one-ment. Ruth in the Bible spends a lot of time reaping in the fields by herself. Judith is the patron of anchoresses because she “virtuously” stays alone in her chambers. But by and large, “the kind of autonomy which we think of as providing the opportunity for sustained solitude, was not available to women. They were ever under the authority of a male,” writes Philip Koch in Solitude.
Early Christian convents give us a well-documented account of this struggle. In roughly the ninth through the twelfth centuries, women founded a way of life that allowed them time alone and a way to follow their inner wisdom. In an interview, feminist historian Barbara Walker said, “Under a sort of guise of being Christian virgins, women went into the convent and there they could have time to consult their own thoughts. In the beginning, when the convents were not too domineered by the church, a lot of noble women went into convents simply to have some time to themselves.” One such movement was the Beguines. The Beguines formed no permanent order, did not enclose themselves, did not follow a leader, and did not renounce their own property (which later became a big sticking point with the church). In some places, the Beguines created whole towns that were entirely run and owned by them, as well as numerous hospitals and homes for the elderly. The Beguine lifestyle offered great freedom, and one of its gifts was time alone. So, inevitably, the Beguines were outlawed. In 1312 the monks of the Inquisition deprived the Beguines of their lands, houses, and freedom because they are “afflicted by a kind of madness, discuss the Holy Trinity and the divine essence, and express opinions on matters of faith and sacraments…. Since these women promise no obedience to anyone and do not renounce their property or profess an approved Rule…their way of life is to be permanently forbidden and altogether excluded from the Church of God,” quotes Barbara Walker in The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (italics mine).
Medieval women did not give up. Here is where the anchoresses come in, during the early thirteenth century or slightly before. An anchoress was voluntarily enclosed for life within a small cell attached to her local church. The door was bolted or bricked up from the outside after an awesome ceremony of enclosure, which in essence was a funeral. The young woman could not leave her cell during her lifetime without being excommunicated from the church. Carol Flinders in Enduring Grace describes Julian of Norwich’s cell as “a very sizable room, reasonably comfortable, which opened (via windows) into the church and out into an enclosed parlor where people would consult with her.” What led women to such an extreme measure, unthinkable by our standards? “A room of her own, a door she could close. Women have regularly been willing to pay a very high price to have that condition…. Maybe it was possible that the whole dramatic ritual that accompanied the closing in of an anchoress was meant to guarantee her safety, to define it as a sacred space that no one else dare enter,” proposes Flinders.
An anchoress was safe, revered as a spiritual icon by the rest of the community and consulted by them as a spiritual guide. What about the women burned as witches? The infamous treatise for the detection and punishment of witches, the Malleus Maleficarum, says, “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” E. William Monter, who has studied trial records of the period, concludes, “It is almost certain that fewer than half of all women accused of witchcraft were married at the time of their accusation. It is no accident that the typical witch of folklore should be an old woman dwelling by herself off in the woods….” The witch persecutions covered two continents and persisted for more than three hundred years. What lessons regarding the danger of solitude and retreat sank into our Western psyches? How it illustrates the collective fear of women alone!
Of course, women still found solitude. We have the great women mystics, such as Teresa of Ávila, who insisted that every one of her nuns have a door “that no one could open without her permission, a real precedent to Virginia Woolf’s a room of one’s own,” as Carol Flinders sees it. Scholastica was St. Benedict’s twin sister, who founded her own convent. Hildegard of Bingen no doubt provided sanctuary for many women and produced numerous masterpieces from her solitude. But perhaps the early part of Catherine of Genoa’s life is more representative. Trapped in a loveless marriage and a noble lifestyle she detested, she prayed to become slightly ill for three years. It allowed her three years to undergo a series of visions that radically changed her life and the lives of many, many others.
Illness has often been women’s only recourse to retreat. Think of Victorian women on their fainting couches. Anthony Storr in Solitude: A Return to the Self notes,
The Victorian lady used regularly to retire for a “rest” in the afternoon. She needed to do so because convention demanded that she should constantly be empathically alert to the needs of others without regard to the needs of her own. Her afternoon rest allowed her to recuperate from the social role of dutiful listener and ministering angel; a role which allowed no scope for self-expression.
She might use a ritual phrase to retire (“One of my headaches is coming on. Nanny, you take the children”). Then she might close the curtains and fold down the bed just so, perhaps placing a cool cloth over her eyes. Let her mind wander, perhaps do a little writing or needlework. Repin her hair and open the curtain before returning to daily life. Of course, this was a refuge available only to upper-class women. Think of the vast majority of women, denied even this modicum of silence and time for the self.
Even Florence Nightingale developed an illness that liberated her from the endless round of household duties, giving her time to study and write in the solitude of her bedroom. Ceremonial artist and retreat leader Cynthia Gale discovered in her illness a gift.
At 30, I was dean of admissions at Sarah Lawrence. I was working 100 hours a week and also exhibiting as a fiber artist in New York. At 31, I had MS and was legally blind. What started for me was a long healing process. I had to heal my life on every level. My illness was my great retreat—not my first retreat but my longest. It afforded me quiet. I spent hours and hours in bed, not able to read, not able to engage in life in the way many people do.
Her illness was an initiation, offering a radical and unrefusable separation; her pain and blindness placed her in liminal space; her intent to listen and heal created her vehicle for listening. This “retreat” turned her life around. She started shamanic studies, and “the ceremonial art began to pour out.”
For centuries women have searched for a physical place to separate, a room of their own. H. G. Wells wrote about his wife Jane’s desire in his autobiography. “She explained what she wanted and I fell in with her idea; and in this secret flat, quite away from all the life that centered upon me, she thought and dreamt and wrote and sought continually and fruitlessly for something she felt she had lost of herself or missed or never attained.” Doris Lessing’s heartbreaking story To Room Nineteen depicts an upper-middle-class English woman who yearns and tries so hard to find her own room and thus a place to locate her lost self that when she fails, she kills herself. The church has provided a shadow of this function for millions of impoverished and oppressed women. Clarissa Pinkola Estés relates a story to this effect from her childhood in Women Who Run with the Wolves:
Many devout women rose before five A.M. and in their long dark dresses wended their way through the gray dawn to kneel in the cold nave of the church, their peripheral vision cut off by babushkas pulled far forward. They buried their faces in their red hands and prayed, told God stories, pulled into themselves peace, strength, and insight. From time to time, my Aunt Katerin took me with her. When once I said, “It is so quiet and pretty here,” she winked as she shushed me. “Don’t tell anyone; it’s a very important secret.” And so it was, for on the walking path to church at dawn and in the dim interior of the church itself were the only two places of that time where it was forbidden to disturb a woman.
Women did find a way to be alone, and their stories show us the final element needed to retreat: great determination. Emily Dickinson, Alice James, Louisa May Alcott, Aphra Behn, George Sand, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, May Sarton, Alice Koller, Anne Bastille, Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, and Terry Tempest Williams are examples of creative women who listened, who bent, carved, hacked, changed, and otherwise defied convention to survive.
Georgia O’Keeffe’s winter of 1928–29 illustrates this struggle. She had just enjoyed the most successful year for her paintings. She had considerable income of her own now. But she was finding herself increasingly without time to herself. She had become quite well known not only for her paintings but also because of Stieglitz’s photos of her, primarily stunning and erotic nudes. She was reviewed first as a woman painter, then as her persona in Stieglitz’s photographs, and only then were her paintings reviewed on their own merit. This greatly disturbed O’Keeffe, and she regularly became ill after her yearly shows. Also pressing on her privacy and time was their hectic society life, the constant strain of being “on,” and the busy summers at Lake George with the Stieglitz family and guests. “Stieglitz’s mother had died and Georgia, as wife of the eldest son, supervised the summer housekeeping for the large family. This, in addition to her painting, was a tremendous task for one so meticulous,” her friend Anita Pollitzer writes in A Woman on Paper. O’Keeffe determined to buy a house of her own at Lake George, “so that she could have the quiet she needed.” But Stieglitz opposed the idea. It was too foreign to his concept of family and family summers. Georgia became increasingly ill and run-down. Out of three physicians consulted, one suggested she was close to death, but another was insightful enough to prescribe “real rest and time to live at her own pace.” Because of this, and the advice of another prominent doctor “to stop expending herself in the busy summers at Lake George,” the idea to spend the summer in New Mexico was born. Stieglitz told all who would listen that “the most dire of calamities has befallen them….” Georgia, too, was troubled, but she felt “much was at stake for her.” She told Anita, “Going West was the hardest decision I ever had to make.” In New Mexico, Georgia and her painting blossomed. Except for 1939, the year she made a trip to Hawaii, she spent every summer, and eventually the rest of her life—long stretches of it alone—in New Mexico in nature.
You may be saying to yourself, “I’m not a brilliant painter. It is not important that I retreat.” Because the examples we have of women on retreat and living in extended solitude are almost exclusively from women of great courage, talent, and at times wealth, it is easy to feel you aren’t worthy or that a retreat is beyond your means. But in Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh brings the archetype into modern life and the scope of solitude almost down to size.
Total retirement is not possible. I cannot shed my responsibilities. I cannot permanently inhabit a desert island…. I must find a balance somewhere between…a swinging pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return.
Three weeks alone in a cottage by the sea. What heaven, we sigh. There are no sacrificed pigs, no praying for illness. She doesn’t need a twig hut or a tribe of people to toast her when she emerges. Yet the retreat pattern emerges. She separates from all that is familiar.
For me, the break is the most difficult. Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It is like an amputation, I feel. A limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done, I find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before.
She lives in liminal space fashioned from solitude, the sound of the ocean, meditation on shells, and writing. She plans her return, acknowledging how difficult it will be to retain the calm perspective she has gained. She brings home talismans to remind her of what she has learned (“The shells will remind me; they must be my island eyes”), placing them in her sisal bag as part of her closing ceremony.
Enlivening the archetypal pattern in a way that fits your life and makes your time apart—even five minutes sitting in your car—numinous and renewing doesn’t involve much more than your willingness to take the first step. As Lindbergh said, “If women were convinced that a day off or an hour of solitude was a reasonable ambition, they would find a way of attaining it.” Are you willing to believe this is a reasonable ambition for you? Are you willing to dedicate your attention to something out of the ordinary, to step away from the safe definitions of daily life? Are you willing to take the first step?