My Year Without Matches by Claire Dunn

Author:Claire Dunn
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 2014-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

8.

I’m curled like larva in a faded sleeping bag, under a tarpaulin sagging with pools of rain, enclosed by a circle of about ten feet in diameter, etched by the tired scuff of my footprints. My hips, bruised and sore from lying down without padding, shift at regular intervals to spread the pressure, a throbbing pink rash spreading down my neck from a tick bite. My tongue is white and pasty, and I can smell my breath against the freshness of the steady rain. I stretch my arm out to reach for the water bottle. If it wasn’t attached to my shoulder, I would worry about it floating away. I concentrate to pilot my arm in on the object and back to my lips. The water tastes sour but I force myself to take a few gulps. Nausea washes over me as the water sloshes around in my empty belly, and I close my eyes to wait for it to pass.

Another fifteen minutes gone, maybe twenty. I peek my eyes open to check the day’s progress. The vague glow of the sun behind the clouds has made no signs of movement up the trunk I’ve been measuring its progression against since daybreak. How is that possible? Never again will I complain about there being never enough hours in a day. There are enough hours to do most anything: write a book, compose a symphony, raise a family. An entire life could be lived in a day. I’m surprised Rome wasn’t built in a day with that many people working on it. As long as there is a sentinel whose only job is to watch every excruciating detail of the Earth’s turning, time will jam up, will slow to an interminable crawl. I now have direct evidence of this, almost three days’ worth.

It feels more like thirty days since I arrived here, at first light, for the first of a four-day “vision quest”. For Native Americans, the vision quest is a sacred ceremony in which initiates sit within a small circle on a mountaintop, fasting and praying for a vision. Many indigenous cultures have some version of it – the Aboriginal walkabout, for instance – a rite of passage involving renunciation and solitude in the wilds, a fast from all things familiar that is designed to break the habitual patterns of the mind and allow a deeper knowledge to arise. “The sledgehammer” is what Kate called it, a less romantic but perhaps more apt name for the fierce beating the ego receives every minute that passes with almost zero stimulation.

This isn’t my first vision quest. When I began studying with Kate and Sam, I signed up for one. Wanting to confront my fear of the dark, I spent most of the four nights burrito-rolled in a tarp, quivering. But what I wasn’t prepared for was how incredibly vast ninety-six hours could feel. The experiences of blissful reunion with nature and the cosmos that I expected were brief blips in an otherwise monotonous sea of tedium and physical pain.

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