There was an image going around on Twitter last week, depicting Winnie the Pooh (what a name), Tigger, and Rabbit sitting around a dining table, with blankets draped over their shoulders as they nurse steaming cups of what I can only assume is hot cocoa. It was quite a thumb-stopping image, amongst news of natural disasters and wife-guy scandals. Yet it’s an image that I keep coming back to, because of its ability to generate within me an immediate sense of warmth and nostalgia.
This image transports me to the beanbag-like couch in my grandparents’ living room, where I would watch early morning cartoons before school. I smell buttery Pillsbury biscuits, fresh from the oven and the sweetness of Welch’s grape jelly. My polo and khaki skirt are still warm from the iron. Outside the air is thick with dew and the sun is slow to rise.
This image reminds me, weirdly, of church camp. Specifically, the last day of church camp. Your duffel bag is packed with your still-damp one piece. You trudge to the cafeteria for what will be the last time, feeling the effects of an emotional hangover from the spirit-filled worship session the night before. You layer oven-baked eggs and American cheese over soft tortillas, and eat your last breakfast around a long table with your cabin-mates –some of whom you may have misread as bitchy or quiet or annoying on the bus ride up the mountain three days ago, but now are inexplicably attached at the hip with.
This image reminds me of retreats. Maybe you’ve been on a work retreat, where you get your own hotel room at the La Quinta Inn, and you eat continental breakfasts and attend workshops that seem to never end. Maybe you’ve been to a wellness retreat where you prune yourself in a hot spring and get your palms read by a woman with silver hair.
In college, I attended several retreats throughout the year with my floormates or my RA staff or various clubs established on campus. At my Christian college, retreats were meant to provide a space to connect with your community and with God, without the distraction of homework, and cell phone service, and the ever-impending pressure to acquire a “ring by spring.”
At my most cynical, I recognize the ways in which these retreats used the promise of “community” (or at least, a very shallow version of it) as a tool to bring impressionable young adults further and further in the fold of an oppressive religious system. But some days, I crave the feeling of a retreat.
Retreats were always full of possibility. There was an expectation that like Moses, you’d come back down the mountain, more holy and full of wisdom than you were before.
The textbook definition of the word “retreat” is “an act of moving back or withdrawing.” This feeling of withdrawal, of stepping away from my reality into something more still, and nurturing, is a feeling I miss from these contemporary Christian music-filled long weekends in the mountains.
I crave the feeling of piling into a bus or a van and holding my breath as we climb on a narrow road, up the mountain. Ice breakers that make way for conversations where I say more than I should while tucked into a bunk bed in the dark. The awkwardness of stuffing a sleeping bag back into its cover. Stopping at In-N-Out on the way home.
I’m tempted to say, as I search for a way to wrap this newsletter up in a bow, that there are ways that I find retreat in my life, now that I don’t go to church camp, or ascribe to the belief that three days in the mountains is enough to change a person. Maybe that’s true in some ways.
I did in 2020, rent an Airbnb upstate with my COVID pod for a few days, in an attempt to chase that feeling I often associate with retreats. Though it was not at all like the kind of retreats I am used to. In our tiny cabin, which was attached to the home of a man named Brian (we love Brian), we made butternut squash soup and drank mulled wine and pulled tarot cards.
Perhaps my favorite thing that we did (and maybe what reminded me of church camp the most) is that on the last night, we sang together. Specifically, we sang old Adele songs like “Turning Tables” and “Someone Like You.” I have to laugh when I think of the four of us wine drunk and happy, harmonizing with each other in a cabin in the Catskills. I was aware of how vulnerable it is to sing in front of your friends, even if it’s the only three friends you’ve seen in person for the past few months. It felt funny, and yet I didn’t want to stop.
In the morning, we woke up hungover, of course. We made pancakes and coffee in the french press. We ate our last breakfast out on the deck, where it was surprisingly warm for an early November morning. We packed our bags in the trunk of the rental car and eventually found our way back to Brooklyn.
When was the last time you went on a retreat? Tell me about it in the comments.
I have never really gone on a retreat
:,)