Tuesday, July 12, 2016: Free day

Tuesday, July 12, 2016: Free day

Tuesday morning after breakfast I continued my Buddhist-Christian interfaith dialog with Emily from Asheville. We sat on the swing outside the dining hall and talked for about an hour. We talked about David Steindl-Rast. Thich Nhat Hanh, Thomas Merton, Pema Chodron, our own callings, and poetry. It seemed an ideal fulfillment of I.D. Blumenthal’s vision for Wildacres as a place for interfaith dialog.

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I spent some time before lunch doing some freewriting. I just mused about what is important to me. It was great to just let it flow. After lunch I had a nice long walk with a writer named Kathy from Boca Raton, Florida. Then I sat on my porch looking at the mountain and ended up meditating for a long time. Wild acres had a temporary interruption in the water system for the whole retreat center, but somehow they still managed to serve a delicious turkey dinner. In the evening, we had the first of two nights of formal student readings. I signed up to read tonight, and as I write this, I am a little nervous, even though it is a warm and receptive audience.

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And, of course, the readings went beautifully, there were many excellent pieces. People were extremely kind and complimentary about my piece. My favorite was by Patrice, and African-American woman who wrote about saying goodbye to her African-born husband, as he left Wildacres a week before she did. She made the racial situation in America very personal. It was powerful.