Cabin in the Hills

Here I sit on the porch of the small cabin I spent the weekend in solitary retreat. Small is the operative word here. Join me on a tour of my 250 square footish cabin. The name of the cabin is fitting for me. Can you read it?

This is where I spent most of my day meditating. I also had a wonderful private circular path for walking meditation in the pinyon juniper forest surrounding my cabin. You'll see the table on the right in the next picture. Again, think small.

My bed overlooked the meditation room. You can see the wood stove to the left of the bed in the kitchen area.

The kitchen had a propane stove. There was no running water, but a pump with delicious spring water was just outside the cabin. I did have a sink that went nowhere. A five gallon bucket is underneath the sink, that I periodically had to manually dump out. It was a bit annoying having to deal with that detail. I've spared you pictures of the outhouse. The cabin had solar lighting for the evenings, which was a really nice feature.

For not being able to watch TV, talk to others, or pet my cat, I was really quite busy the whole time. The practice and prayer I had been given to do for nine hours one of the days was challenging. I can't say I did it perfectly, but that wasn't really the point. It's amazing how busy your mind can be when your life is really simple. The gift of simplicity is appreciated more now that I am back to the craziness of work. As challenging as the simplicity was, I miss it.

I did take the opportunity to do some meditating on a future child. I followed the meditations out of the book "Spirit Babies", by Walter Makichen. That is the book I refer to in a previous post. I had some interesting revelations from those meditations. I was not ready to meditate on a future child until I dealt with the ones who had passed. I thought I had already done that, but I discovered there was some unfinished business to take care of first.

Forgiveness is a theme that came up over the weekend. I have a hard time forgiving myself. That could mean a lot of things. For one, I distract myself from my true spirit a lot. As painful as that is, I really like doing it. I got in touch with the simplicity of my true self this past weekend. My ego had a revolt at the same time, saying, what a waste of time, but I didn't listen to her. My true self knew better. I think I'll be doing a solitary retreat again.