Freshly Laundered & Hanging Out to Dry: Chapter1, Part1

Foreword

A memoir is supposed to be true. However, I’m sure the one hundred people who shared the experience of being young adult students at Sherborne on the second course would tell the story differently. And I hope they will.

The names of living people or ones whose status is unknown to me have been changed to provide anonymity.

In answer to the question: Why all the quotes? Aphorisms have the same appeal to me as the living quarters of ships and recreational vehicles—a clear sense of priorities. They seem to declare, “We have only a small amount of space and here are the essentials for daily life.” Maybe that’s what I had hoped to take away from Sherborne—a clear understanding of what was important. Here’s my version of what happened there.

Not that the story need be long,
but it will take a long while to make it short. _Henry David Thoreau

Freshly Laundered & Hanging Out to Dry. Part I
Introduction

Chapter 1
Gardening With Cutlery

The present is what it is,
but it may be possible to change the future.
We can only reap now the harvest sown in the past,
and if we feel compassion for the sufferings of the present
and we wish a different harvest for those who are to come,
we must sow different seeds now. _JG Bennett

It is early in the year 1973. I am using a dessertspoon to dig dandelions out from the great lawn. We’re in front of Sherborne House, a nineteenth century manor turned into an experimental spiritual school for adults. One hundred other warm bodies are out here with me doing the same thing. Well, not everyone is using a dessertspoon. The people who arrived first got garden tools and the rest of us procured cutlery from the dining hall. We’ve learned to creatively make do with what we have. It’s one of the many lessons we’re learning here. This scene is a snapshot of all that being at the school means to me.

Although we live here as the student body, it feels like we are living parallel lives, often not actually interacting. There is little time to develop relationships in the ordinary way that friendships grow. Indeed, we are often reminded, “Making friends is not what you are here for.” We are here to learn what it is that we human beings do not know about ourselves that keeps us from living a peaceful sustainable life. Despite the number of people in view, there is no sound of human voices. We are working in a mode of attentive silence, which in combination with the smell of damp soil, produces a deep emotion in my chest, as if we are standing in an ancient cathedral filled with the prayers of generations instead of outside on a lawn. Every fifteen minutes someone rings a bell which signals us to become even more still, to sense another point on the body according to a pattern we’ve been taught, perhaps to breathe into the point, perhaps to say some words that help us blend subtle energies of sensations and intentions. I keep forgetting to do the exercise. It’s as if I’ve used up any internal storage space I might have had for making such efforts. Mostly I just do from the outside what we’ve been given to do, depending on the actions of others—standing still, looking attentive—to remind me of that much. I waver between awareness of the ridiculous to a feeling of the sublime. As I end the lives of dandelions I have no wish to kill, I see four-year old me tugging at my mother’s skirt while she chats with a neighbor. They’re standing on the lawn behind our house seemingly oblivious to my presence. Finally, mother notes my tugs and bends over to hear what I’m trying to whisper. I do not want to shame my mother’s friend for her carelessness so I ask my mother to move her friend off the dandelion she is stepping on. Mom tells her and they both have a good laugh. I notice again that all of us students are here on the lawn, each alone fulfilling a silent task, increasing a sense of ourselves by sensing the points on our bodies, hoping our efforts will allow something higher to enter into us. Sometimes a prayer comes because I feel such a strong connection to something beyond us; and sometimes a prayer comes because I think I cannot bear to be here another minute, herded through a relentless schedule and complex inner exercises that make me feel beyond redemption. Am I grateful to love everyone here on the lawn or am I grateful to understand that I don’t have to live this way forever? The knees of my dungarees are soaking wet from the dew that is still on the grass despite a welcome sunny day. I’ve long become used to such discomforts and inner confusion, having lived at Sherborne now for almost five months. Only occasionally do I think about how I got here, how badly I wanted to be here, joking with my friends about going to a monastery. Not that it is a monastery, at least Mr. Bennett, the draftsman of the experiment never called it that. On the other hand, maybe it is a monastery in the real sense of the word—a community of people living together for spiritual purposes—though in this case, only for a ten-month course of study.