The word retreat is an interesting one--in battle, it means "fall back to a safer position until we can regather ourselves for another attack." This is a specific action. But it also has come to mean the place itself. I am staying overnight at a retreat center near my home. The purpose of the retreat is to carve out some much needed space for curriculum planning at my university. I came here with a small team of teachers, but there were close to one hundred of us here for this short time. It is a time out of time, a retreat. Life goes on outside of this space in its usual way--work continues, errands, busyness. But here, time stops its usual progression and sort of empties out. It's not that time slows down--it's that it just sort of pauses. I can retreat from a war, but only long enough to gather up my strength for the next battle. It's interesting to me that in this way, retreat takes on the context that life is a battle and that we all need a break from it every now and then. I don't know if I'm entirely comfortable with the idea of life as a battle. It sounds so contentious. It sounds so difficult and contrary. Shouldn't life be "a bowl of cherries" or "a dream" (as in "Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream; merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.") But I know better of course. Life is difficult and contrary and tiring and frustrating. But it is also wonderful and funny and envigorating and surprising and lovely. And sometimes it's war. It is in retreat that the wonderfulness of life returns to us.
