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It was a silent, windless night far north, beyond the harsh lights of city and suburb. I was lying belly down on a dock, staring into utterly still water. The diamond splash of stars above was reflected perfectly beneath me.

I was rapt, drawn out of myself by the strangeness of finding stars above and below. With a slight shift in perception, suddenly all was space and points of light. I was falling, floating in this wondrous, mesmerizingly unfamiliar space. I was suspended, lost in an ocean of stars. 

I guess it’s seasonally appropriate—it’s the dark time of year, and once again my mood is dark. There’s a gathering undertow pulling me down, until I’m drowning in the fear of drowning. There’s the kind of anxiety that makes staying still an agony and every activity terrifying. Creativity is absent. These words are hard to write.

Visiting my mom in the old folk’s home is a lot like going on retreat. On retreat, the days can be long, as I sit, eat, and walk in a silence punctuated with my own restless thoughts. On my visits to my mom, we too sit, eat, and walk in a silence punctuated by her restless, repetitive questions (“Why did you come? Are you my guest? Why am I here?”) and my repetitive answers. Just as on retreat, there are moments of peace, stretches of boredom and periods of head-nodding semi-sleep, both of us upright in our chairs. For the days I’m there, nothing new is happening. Nothing much is being accomplished. It’s the same thing, over and over.

“Gurudev is in town!”—my fellow yoga teacher’s eyes were glowing, nay, glistening with unshed tears. But I couldn’t share her excitement. While she was still under the sway of the charismatic yogi who had brought my brand of yoga to North America, I had been taught by one of his disenchanted disciples. The guru had been thrown out of his own ashram after sleeping with all the wrong people (including those underage) and icing the criminal cake with some financial malfeasance. I hadn’t experienced his powers first hand, but I gathered from my friend’s reactions, and her easy dismissal of his crimes, that they must have been significant. 

The rain poured down without cease, a thorough, all-embracing sound. I was ensconced in the shelter of a tarp I’d slung between two trees, its sides open above the leafy softness of the forest floor. My comfy sleeping bag lay over a ground sheet. I had about six by three feet of space in which to stay dry for a long wet day, spent on the side of a mountain in Vermont. I slept, I mused, I wrote. It was heaven.

Folklore and myth are full of lost children—abandoned due to curses, hidden away by fearful parents, exiled by evil kings and cruel stepmothers. Cast on the waters, left on hilltops, hidden in caves, their fate seems murky— until they reappear to either tragedy or triumph. Oedipus learns his true identity only to discover that he has fulfilled the dark prophecy that he was trying to outrun. But Perseus and Dionysos emerge victorious, avenging their rejection. Likewise, the youngest sons or rejected daughters of folktales overcome their outcast status and achieve treasure and acclaim. 

It was day three of a seven-day meditation retreat and I was busy sabotaging my practice by wallowing in guilt. At the mid-week interview with the meditation leader I complained about these negative thoughts: “I don’t know why I do this to myself.” 

“But are you doing it?” she said. “Are you doing it?” 

Well, no. My thoughts were basically thinking themselves, assailing me when whether I wanted them or not. The more closely I observed myself, the more I came to the conclusion that I had ridiculously little control over the thoughts and reactions that drove me into various states and actions.