It has been over a week since I moved on from a week at Nina’s house north of Tallahassee, FL and I haven’t even reported on my stay with her and how I came to be there again. When I was there she introduced me to her friend Bill at the Wildcat Creek Educational Center in Blountstown, FL where I am now. But that will be the subject of my next post!
Saturday the 10th of March came around and it was time for me to leave my sister Becky’s house in Clearwater, FL. Soon thereafter the house would be a bit over-full and I’d agreed to that date for my departure. My thought was to head back north, to reconnect with my friend Jo so we could plan our trip to Arizona together and in the process figure out where I’d be in the meantime, hopefully somewhere where I could make myself useful. Since Tallahassee is on the bus route back to Albany, GA where Jo lives, I gave Nina a call to see what was up and see if she would like to visit again on my way north. If you have been following me, you may recall that Nina is the woman I met earlier in the winter in the bus terminal in Tampa, who had already put me up for one night on my way to Koinonia Farm. It turned out, to my surprise, that she was planning to head south to the Tampa Bay area that same weekend, and then turn around and head home on Sunday the 11th! She immediately started to figure out how she could give me a ride north and when she heard that I was free, invited me to stay with her and her partner for a week or so if I’d like.
She was heading to Venice to visit a 95 year old friend who’s health was failing, or so she thought. She wanted to see her again before she passed and possibly help take care of her for a while. She had the use of her partner’s car through the weekend, so it was an opportunity to do so without suffering the chemical smells on the bus (from scented detergent in people’s clothes, etc.) to which she is so sensitive. The challenge was to juggle the multiple stopovers she had in mind, and still manage to pick me up on Saturday, or come up with some other plan to meet. After a few back and forth ideas and changes of plan on her part over the course of a couple of days, on Saturday she finally said that she wanted to plan on staying in Venice and take me up on an offer to drive her partner’s car back to him on Sunday. By the time that decision had been made, I’d already determined that I could take public busses from Becky’s house to Venice for half of the price of a ticket to Tallahassee so I was happy to do her the favor and allow her to be with her friend for a more extended caretaking visit.
I left the house in Clearwater at 3pm and headed for the local bus stop. Five and a half hours and 5 buses later, I arrived at her friend Matilda’s house. On two occasions local city bus drivers had given me pass’es that allowed me to take the next bus, even though I was supposed to pay another small fee for each leg. I guess they took pity on me, because I didn’t have the exact change needed and was going to have to make a special stop at a store to get same! Welcome generosity, indeed.
In the course of the next 17 hours, I learned that while Matilda is old, she still has strong ideas about what is best for her and that includes continuing to live in her apartment, even though she has been falling a lot lately. In the short time we were with her, we saw her stumble and catch herself multiple times. Amazingly, none of the falls have resulted in broken bones and once she has some help righting herself she goes back to insisting that she is fine living alone. The falls were the reason Nina wanted to stay. She felt that someone ought to be caring for her full time, so she could get help moving around without risking a fall that could easily lead to serious injury. There was a possibility that Matilda would go to a hospice facility for a couple of days to be evaluated and be sure her medications were all still working properly: she is a diabetic who has been self administering insulin injections for many years, and also had some prescriptions for sleep and anxiety to manage. Evidently she admitted to Nina that her last fall was probably due to some confusion and excess medication, causing additional imbalance when walking.
By Sunday morning, after spending just one night in the apartment, Nina was sure that she was not going to be able to stay after all. The smells of residue from a neighbor’s cigarette smoke wafting into the open hallway door were too much for her to endure, given her sensitivities. She was already getting headaches. I actually offered to stay for a while instead and Nina thought that would be good, but in the end Matilda insisted that no one could stay more than a night or two, because the apartment complex had rules against longer term visitors! Besides, she was clear that she did not want anyone to stay; she insisted she did not need us to follow her around to catch her in case she fell!
On the way home Nina stopped at her mother’s house to pick some neem leaves, which have many medicinal uses.
In the end, our main contribution to her well being was cleaning up her apartment, a task she no longer has the strength to do herself. We swept, mopped, did laundry and cleaned in the kitchen. She even got into the spring cleaning mode herself, re-organizing and tidying up in her bedroom.
There were quite a few other twists and turns along the way, including my going to her church in the morning to meet her local friends and a visit from a hospice nurse, but I’ve already shared more than enough detail here! At around 3pm Sunday, Nina and I got into her partner’s car and headed back up to fetch him from the Tallahassee airport.
The weather was beautiful many days at Nina’s house. The nicest place to walk was in the Bear Creek Educational Forest, which was about a half mile around the corner from her house.
My week with them was very nice. It started out fairly uneventful. One of the reasons Nina thought I’d enjoy being with them that week, was an author was coming to town sponsored by their local Theosophical Society group and she thought I’d be interested to hear what he had to say. The subject was “The History of the Chakras.” Unfortunately, a snow storm that week in Boston caused his flight to be canceled and he couldn’t make the date.
Bill has hosted Native American style sweat lodges down by the creek. We checked out the framework he uses when Nina took me to meet him.
Towards the end of the week Nina offered to take me to meet her friend Bill and check out the possibility of staying with him for a while. I was impressed by both him and his project. He is using permaculture principles to develop 82 acres into an international hostel, at which visitors will work for 2 hours a day in addition to their overnight fees. He will draw people with his love and knowledge of the land as well as canoeing / kayaking trips on the local river.
Bill’s current priority is finishing a small building (virtually the same footprint as my tiny house) he will use for an indoor kitchen. Up to now, he has done all the cooking outdoors under tarps, which reminds me of the setup Karl and I have used back home at SmallFoot. Since I have building experience it seemed a perfect opportunity to be of service and have a nice place to stay in the process.
On the way to Bill’s land we stopped to look at the new tiny house village being built for low income and homeless people in Tallahassee.
Bill and Nina were both planning to go to Tallahassee to attend a “Veggie fest” on Sunday, which would allow me to get to his place easily. The festival was designed to promote vegetarian and vegan lifestyles so it drew a fair number of hippies and progressives. We enjoyed sampling tasty products at the booths, and watched a local restaurant chef prepare a stir frie. I especially enjoyed meeting Nina’s friend Sam, a handsome, bright eyed young man that is a member of their theosophy group. He was full of insights and inspiration for spiritual practice and heathy interpretations of our world, so we exchanged pretty deeply considering we had just met!
Ups and downs in my new dream yoga practice
I’m starting to realize that moving to a new location every week to 10 days is not really so great for my spiritual practices! Especially the new sleep based ones, which I’m still learning and exploring. The first half of the week at Nina’s house saw me going into regular unconscious sleep most of the nights. It was the same pattern I’d seen in Clearwater, where during the beginning of the stay my practice was not nearly as fruitful as it was towards the end. It is becoming clear that the quality of my day-time practices of mindfulness and meditation pave the way for fruitful night-time practice, just as Wangyal teaches. This seems to even be true on a day-to-day basis; a recent solo retreat day of meditation was followed by sleep practices with facets that were particularly profound.
I’ve shared about my new practices with my sister Susan, another devoted seeker. Now she is also reading Wangyal’s book and trying out his techniques on a nightly basis! The last two Saturday mornings we have had very interesting study sessions by reading key sections of the book together. Hopefully the insights and understandings one of us has which the other appreciates are more of a help than a hindrance, because we are both beginners in this ancient Tibetan Buddhist practice! She has signed up for a three day workshop with Wangyal in Colorado this June and I’m tempted to go along with her if I can swing it financially. I’m going to wait to see how my practice unfolds before making that decision, partly because I believe the workshop is designed for people that are quite new enough to the practices that they may not have had any experiences of lucid dreaming or awareness of sleep before. How much of the material covered will be useful to me, where I’m already experiencing both quite often? I don’t know.
I’ve sent an email to the address on Wangyal’s main website, enquiring if there is any way I could consult with him long distance, but after 11 days I’ve still not gotten a reply. Is the webmaster screening out requests like mine, or is Wangyal simply too busy to keep up with his email? Maybe time will tell. For now I continue to be quite pleased that my spiritual practices are both during the day and night, with the night time practices being perhaps even more fruitful than those during the day!
I’m not going to share any details about those fruits here yet. Given my nascent understanding of the practices, that seems premature.
The emergency exit of the bus I’m staying in at Wildcat has become the main entrance, complete with deck.
As I write this I’m going into my second week with Bill at Wildcat Creek. He prefers to keep the length of stay of his visitors short and has other young people coming to live on his land with him soon, so I may be moving on before the second week is over. I’ll write about our building and my practice adventures here in my next post.
As I make finishing touches to this post, I’ve heard back from my friend Jo. Unfortunately she has had an injury to her leg that precludes our traveling together this spring. So I’m back to the state of almost anything being possible, with nothing certain, at least until my daughter Rose’s college graduation in May! Shall I go back to the Upper Valley before then, or head directly to Ithaca when the time comes? I’m not sure yet.