the travelling enthusiast

I went to Esalen. How was it?

The background: I wasn't expecting to go to Esalen. June-July-August were crazy busy, David kept going away on trips, and at one point after he got back from the latest trip and then had a shitton of call and I *still* had to keep everything running single-handed for another solid week and then realized he had another 4 work trips planned before the end of the year, I got mad and melty-downy and declared that I was going to take a week off on one of the bare handful of weeks where David and Charlie could spare me. But I didn't have a plan beyond that.

I thought maybe I'd go up to Lassen Volcanic National Park and just rent a cabin and hang out. But I didn't follow through on booking anything. Then I thought maybe it'd be a staycation, I'd just stay at home, do our normal thing in the evenings, and spend the days deep cleaning and doing yoga and reading while Charlie and David were out of the house.

David respectfully pointed out that "staying home and deep cleaning" is not a week off. He said, "Jeff and Sonya [our neighbors, who are respectively America's leading tractor painter and an acupuncturist] were telling me about this place called Esalen. It's got hot springs and famous people used to go there. You should do that."

I looked it up. It seemed way more crystally-crunchy than I am (get a massage based on your astrological birth chart!), but I don't mind being around the people who are into that stuff. I wasn't totally excited but, fuck it. Let's see what happens, even if I hate it then I'll at least figure out a little bit more about what kind of solo vacations do work for me.

Tuesday: Everyone arrived at Esalen Monday afternoon/evening, except for me, because David's call shift didn't end till 6 am Tuesday. I drove down Tuesday morning. The last part of the route to Esalen is on a jaw-droppingly beautiful version of my own personal Hell: a twisty, turny, up-and-down road high up along the edge of the Pacific with a sheer drop on one side, and only guardrails about 70% of the time. You can't go faster than 25-30 miles. You can't exit; there are no other roads. You can keep going to your destination, or you can turn around and go back. I arrived overwhelmed and frazzled and went through the motions of being a functional person who can park her car, check into her room, go to a yoga class, walk around a bit. It was all an act. Esalen is also breathtakingly beautiful, tucked into a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the mountains rising up behind you, and paths running into the pine forest and clean fresh air. It's like Rivendell, if Rivendell were built in the 60s by a bunch of hippies. When you are already frazzled and tired that kind of beauty feels like an assault on your senses. At some point I went to the bookstore and bought the most mainstream, least healthy chocolate they had (which was still plastered in words like "sustainable" and "vegan" and "fair trade") and just curled up in my little loft bed and ate it and felt miserable.

Wednesday: I slept terribly (this, unfortunately, did not get magically better at Esalen) and I had roommates so I couldn't even get up and move around and make noise. At 6:45 or so I figure we're probably in the socially acceptable time to accidentally wake up your roommates as you leave, so I head out. Yoga class. Breakfast. I picked up Robert Sapolsky's memoir in the bookstore. I took an edible. Things got better. People talked to me at lunch, and continued talking to me at dinner. Esalen is a place where, when people ask "how are you?", they really mean it and you can really tell them. I read (The Road Through The Wall, The Bird's Nest, Come Along With Me & short stories, The Warrior's Apprentice, Going Infinite, Memoir of a Primate, Cetaganda, The Refrigerator Monologues) and drank numerous cups of mint tea and ate dried apricots by the fistful. Different pieces of Esalen kept evoking different sense memories of other times and places: walking up steep hills like the ones at Alpha. This stream in the woods, like the ones I spent about 50% of my childhood in and around. Sitting on the lawn: like being on my college campus. The carpet in my loft, and the wood walls: like vacationing in New Hampshire. There had been a workshop Monday night called "Dropping Into Esalen", which I'd missed, and so it wasn't until middle of the afternoon on Wednesday when I realized that dropping in is a *thing*, a very specific thing, where you start to experience Esalen in a very different way than you typically experience being alive. And it was happening - I was dropping in.

Thursday: Wake up. Take edible. Go to an ecstatic dance class, which was amazing and perfect and cathartic and energizing. Breakfast. Chill out at the hot springs. Read more. Drink more mint tea. Get a massage. Tried a Gestalt workshop, which was fascinating but Too Much for me now (and maybe ever.) Sit on the patio and talk to people at dinner, and continue talking to people after the food was gone and the local raccoons were weaving their way along the edge of the patio in the hopes of cadging some leftovers.

Friday: Wake up at 3:30, and read, and wait. 5:30, go down to the hot springs. It's still dark out, there's a full sky of stars and a waning half-moon, and nobody there. I get into a tub out on the balcony, naked, and just float there and look up at the stars and listen to the roar of the Pacific Ocean. I stay there as the sky gets lighter and lighter and other people trickle in to sit in the tubs and watch the sunrise together. Ok, I thought: nothing else I do today is going to top this, so I'm not going to try. So I had breakfast, I packed up my stuff, went for a goodbye walk around the campus and then drove home. I got to experience a different, much less picturesque version of another personal Hell (Bay Area traffic), and then I was home.

The cat greeted me by sitting next to me, purring as long as I pet him and then biting me if I dared stop. Charlie did the toddler equivalent, which was lots of hugs and demanding Mommy play with him, sit with him, hug him, and *also* flipping out and throwing food when Mommy tried to get Charlie to eat his dinner off a clean plate instead of the dirty one that had been sitting on the table since yesterday. David greeted me mostly by being very tired.

I woke up again this morning at 3:30 but felt kind of well-rested? Kind of not in as much back pain as I usually am? I lay there awhile and thought about Esalen and finally got up and started writing this. I have dropped out of Esalen back into the rest of the world, and I don't know yet what has changed or what that will look like.

Every baby is different, but at this point I am mystified by all the parents I see online who are so aggressively following parenting books and sleep training guidelines and seeing it have an effect on their child.

C sort of does what he wants and it all works out in the end.

He's gone back to sleeping a solid 6ish hours and only waking one or twice to be fed. I am reasonably sure that the chaotic miscellany of sleeping strategies we tried over the past month had absolutely no effect on his current blissful somnolence -- only an effect on our sanity and composure and, of course, our feelings about ourselves as parents.

One of the biggest revelations about parenting I've had is how insidious and toxic parenting culture is. And, like other well-meaning but ultimately toxic and insidious modern cultures, it becomes nearly impossible to talk about your true experiences and feelings without being torn apart.

I wonder if it's always been this bad.