Crossing over the 100-day marker of Covid’s party-crashing US shores, with its only competition in mayhem, death, and destruction being the man clocking his 1,283rd day in the White House, the mood among the people is becoming decidedly squirrely. Held together by a whisper. Maybe a prayer, if that’s your thing. And also, I think, a dose of resignation. The root of that word is resign, and while there can be plenty of passive connotations that come from the sense of giving in, submitting, or acquiescing, I’m starting to read a lot of possibilities into making that word active. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that all of the go-to responses I’d normally pull out when eye-to-eye with even one of the triple-threat crises America is currently facing—pandemic, protests, and politics—need work. Or rather, they need to be stripped down and seen in the naked light of the moment.

And apparently, some people have gotten that memo and taken it literally, whether stripped bare in the service of just another hot night in New York City and why are we even bothering to pretend with the clothes anymore like the guy pictured above, or naked in the process of exposing the utter fragility of being human in the face of armed intimidation, as the woman who has been dubbed “Naked Athena,” did recently in Portland. She, in nothing more than a mask and skull cap, stared down a line of federal infiltrators in full body-armor regalia, and damn if they didn’t seem the more exposed party. In the face of nakedness, apparently the first thing that came to mind was to throw a few smoke bombs in her direction. Because of course they did. They had to do something, I mean, she was naked. Nothing more threatening than that.

But to sit, whether clothed or not, your call, in the nakedness of emotion, fear, hope, and all else, that is intimidating in a very special and often excruciating-meets-satisfying way. Daunting even. A few years ago I signed up for a ten-day silent meditation. It wasn’t that I was unaware of what it would ask of me, although just what it would ask of me I wouldn’t know until I was there, and that of course scared the crap out of me. But being someone who enjoys a bit of control, I tried to figure out if there was a kind of training I could do to be prepared for this experience. Something like the thirty-day training programs I’d used to train for marathons. But, no, it wasn’t like I could practice not talking to anyone for ten days. I needed my job, I lived in the world, I had to speak words out of my mouth. So I resigned myself to just being surprised. And probably tortured. And hopefully also enlightened. The first three days were intense and new. I marveled at the challenge, followed all the directions, paid attention and tried to strip away my stubborn chatter. I gathered beautiful little pine cones from the snowy yard during our free-time walks. I lined these tiny pine cones up on my window sill as markers, reminders of the days that had passed. On day four, sitting on the ground in my room, I stared at those pine cones with a certain amount of terror. It wasn’t so much that they had completely crumbled in the dry heat of my room, having lost all the moisture of their natural habitat, it was more that they completely represented my current state of mind. (And, no, it’s not lost on me that this near-perfect metaphor is almost too perfect.) I was a mess. I was ready to leave immediately. I seriously considered going to whoever it was that held the velvet bag with the truck keys in it and miming my need for them, then escaping. Or possibly just grabbing the bag and running to the parking lot. I would of course come back at the end of ten days and pick up Dennis, who was over in the men’s area, and the other friend we’d brought who I assumed was blissing out down the hall from me. The voices in my head, the ones I was meant to let float away, or at least stay silent, during meditation were raising holy hell: You cannot do this. You are not cut out for this. Who’s idea was this? Stripping yourself down to just the bare basic you? No distractions. Ten days with just myself? No fucking way. I am going insane. I don’t want to know myself that well. Where the hell is my bag? Where is my coat? I cannot get this emotionally naked. If I do, I’ll never be able to slip into another jumpsuit of emotional armor again.

Then I think I fell asleep, or the lady with the gong called me to the nth meditation of the day and I went. I’m not going to pretend that from there on out it was smooth Banga (the dissolution of the physical body) sailing. No. Not even close. But the focus on something other than my moment-to-moment thoughts, the ability to sit with the discomfort of what was coming up emotionally and to be aware of the sensations that happened when I thought about those things. To not try and clothe those thoughts in layers and layers of mental material in order to stifle their voices. That was an amazing achievement and one that I try hard to remember during the dailies I’ve done ever since. There might have been a hope, but I knew it was probably an unattainable expectation, that I could carry that kind of emotional nakedness into the world once the retreat was over. Although I also knew that complete and utter exposure could be really strange and probably not a great look if I wanted to function in the world at large. But even in the little tiny steps made, I still recognize the power of being more transparent to myself. More naked in my curiosity. To keep the self-serving, knee-jerk armor off so I can start (& continue) the work of myself.

Last week I wrote about the music, and it’s an emotional place I’ll keep exploring. But also, in this time of reckoning, looking directly at the nakedness of suffering that is exposed and intertwined: the pandemic, which preys especially on those put in harm’s way, whether because age has put them in a precarious position or the color of their skin and state of their economy has forced them out to do the work that needs to be done. A direct line to the protests, which demand that I strip away the racial biases I’ve grown up and into, that ask me to look beyond my comfort zone so that I can recognize the supremacy of being white and re-clothe myself with some humbleness and necessary action. And finally, to keep the forward movement to call out that politically, the emporer has no clothes. To gather in the people all over the country who will join in this chorus so that in November we can expose his nakedness at the voting booth.