Ramblings On The Path

Six-Week Retreat

To the left everything was white, to the right everything was white; I looked down. Below my feet, everything was white. I looked upwards, seeking the sky. It was an identical white. I began to feel disoriented. I could not tell which way to go, and was unsure as to which way was up, so I followed the back of the person in front of me.

This was my introduction to the Hotel Jägermatt, a hotel and restaurant on the Feldberg mountain in the Black Forest of Germany, a few miles south of Freiburg. I heard that they made the best pizzas in Germany. It had not snowed much all winter; certainly not enough for skiing, but heavy snow had come at last, two weeks ago, and my companions and I had been concerned that we might not be able to make it here from the airport in Basel, some 20 miles away, across the border in Switzerland. We had been told that taxis would be waiting for us at the airport, but they had failed to get there. Instead, we travelled to Freiburg by train, and, with help from a local inhabitant, found a taxi to take us the last few miles.

We had come to spend six weeks, with a hundred or so other people, in a retreat to be run by Paul Lowe. When I had first heard of the retreat, one evening during a quiet moment at the end of one of the meetings in London, and before I had heard any details about it, I immediately asked if I could go on it. The retreat had not been formally announced; I had merely overheard a private discussion about it. My heart had jumped at the opportunity, and the rest of me duly followed, even though I did not know how I might find the money to pay for it. Then, out of the blue, my mother gave me a few thousand pounds. One of my sisters had asked her for something, and my mother had decided that I and my other two sisters should receive the same monetary equivalent. This was enough to pay for the retreat, but, being unemployed, I had barely enough money for the fares. I also needed more clothes. I told Maggie that I wanted to go on this retreat, even though I could not afford it. I did not ask her to help me financially.

A few days later, she asked me if I still wanted to go on the retreat. I said Yes. She wandered off into another room, and I could hear her talking to herself. I had just been consulting the Tarot when she had asked me. Now she came back and asked if she could choose just one of the cards. I handed her the pack and, keeping the cards face down, she chose one at random. It was the ten of cups — ‘Salvation’. In the Barbara Walker pack, this card shows a young man kneeling at the start of a path which winds away through a dark forest. He holds a drinking vessel in his hand. A young woman looks down at him, one hand on his shoulder, the other pointing in the direction of the path into the far distance, where there is a tall and steep mountain with a castle on top.

I was amazed that this card had come up; I believe that Maggie was surprised, too, for she asked if she could look at the rest of the pack, thinking that perhaps many of the cards had similar images on them. None do. One of the meanings of this card is ‘an achievement of a quest’, and the symbolism could not have been clearer, nor more appropriate. Maggie had been considering whether to help me go on the retreat; this card seemed to be the clincher. She told me that she would pay my fares and buy me some clothes to wear. This was very generous of her.

Now, in the hotel, I was disoriented, anxious, and confused. I didn’t know what I was to do, or where I was to go. And then the energy hit me. Paul was sitting at a table in the restaurant, chatting with some people, presumably his helpers. Their energy seemed to fill the place to overflowing with an excited, loving vibrancy; an energy so fine and yet so powerful that I was helpless to control its effect on me, and yet I also felt unable to accept it, to just let it be there. Part of me wanted to turn around and flee; the rest of me was hooked, like a moth to a candle flame. It was numbing my mind, making it almost impossible to think. I sat down, trembling, and was grateful for the mug of coffee that was offered me — it gave me something to hold on to, something to occupy myself with, while I calmed down.