by Sara Flitner

My most memorable 4th of July was the year I survived a tornado and made a cake that was decorated like an American flag. The recipe called for a vat of white frosting, blueberries and strawberries for stripes, and small dollops of frosting for stars. I placed the cake in the center of the table, proud of being allowed to share this masterpiece—and hoping my very popular friend would recognize the cake from Seventeen magazine and perhaps see me as worthy of the “in crowd.” 

Just then, the window exploded, littering the room—and my cake—with tiny, menacing shards of glass. Outside, I saw the tornado’s real damage: trees ripped from roots, buckets and saddle blankets in the upper meadow. Our bright red horse trailer was stood up on its crumpled forehead and the truck next to it lay on its back in a dead bug pose, wheels still turning. No one was injured, thankfully, and we hugged each other and laughed nervous laughs. “It’s a good day to be alive in a free country,” one of the old men said. 

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by Sara Flitner

This post is the third of three installments on my recent experience at a silent meditation retreat. Read Part One here and Part Two here.

I have survived five days in silence and reflection and am headed home in a state of gratitude—that I had such an opportunity, that I survived the “midlife crisis” day and gained so much insight. And honestly, that it is over.  

On the flight home I am glad to sit quietly. I watch the clouds and ground below me tell a story of westward migration, homes and roads becoming sparser as we leave the coast and fly west. The ground empties beneath us. Though we are moving at more than 500 mph, things below appear in slow motion, reminding me how much more I can see when I slow down. After days of moving slowly, unencumbered by distraction, I am primed to recognize how much more I take in from an attentive, intentional pace. It’s interesting how much easier it is to observe things without attaching a story…and more interesting still to see how the “stories” are simply distraction in a different form.  For now, my mind seems to have made peace with itself and follows the nature of things below, emptying.  

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by Sara Flitner

This post is the second of three installments on my recent experience at a silent meditation retreat. Read Part One here.

By Tuesday morning of this five-day silent retreat, memories of my first longer retreat (six days) crop in. I was curious then – and still am – about my brain’s function after a period of neurological rest. Also, to be honest, I wanted to see how hard it would be to stay quiet and unplugged. I found out that even for an extrovert, quiet is necessary and nourishing. While I missed my family, I came away feeling, as I shared with a friend, that the experience had been “life-changing, in an undramatic way.”   

I’m (naively) expecting to have the same gentle epiphany. 

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by Sara Flitner

Seventy-two hours ago, I was planning my week of regular work, checking off the week’s board meeting, team huddles, and trainings. Instead, I have just landed 2,300 miles from home, at a retreat center, where, thanks to my friend and dear mentor, I’ll join a silent meditation retreat for the week. It’s been a few years since I’ve done a longer retreat, and I am the least experienced “retreatant” of our small group. But the invitation to join was too good to pass up, made possible by my dear friend, who will be with me as we sit with and learn from two of the finest minds in meditation, compassion, and awareness training.  

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by Sara Flitner

My younger son came crashing through the front door of our Airbnb, obliterating the silence I was using to try to let my body arrive here, 3,234 miles from home, which we’d left just five days earlier. “I had to interrupt,” he exclaimed. “I knew you’d want to see the cardinal.” 

I leapt to my feet because he was right. I did want to see this bird, common as a sparrow in the southeastern part of the country, but uncommon to us. Flicker of red, jaunty crown, I spied him through the leaves and his shyness. 

We speak in shorthand, my sons and I, through feathers and fur. We developed this habit as they started leaving home, with some things too tender for words.

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by Sara Flitner

Abraham Lincoln was born poor, prone to ill-health, and afflicted by bouts of crippling depression. He was neither fancy nor handsome and spoke with a high-pitched tone. In his rise to the U.S. presidency, he was deceived by close confidants and nearly died of exhaustion more than once, then again from grief over the loss of his young son, Eddie. 

Somewhere in President Lincoln’s grief, exhaustion, and depression was a pull even stronger than the pull toward his own safety: the end of slavery, and the hope for freedom. 

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by Sara Flitner

My brother called from his ranch in eastern Oregon to catch up on my visit to the base of the Big Horns, where we grew up on the ranch now owned by our oldest brother. There are four of us siblings, with our older sister, and we share a code, indecipherable to others who don’t share a set of memories and experiences braided together like the bailing twine we’d pick up as kids. “I took the dogs out past where I begged you to let me sleep in the road after senior prom,” I told him, the only living soul who knew the spot. He had been my chaperone, all those years ago, for trailing some horses out to spring pasture at 5 a.m.—an early morning and a big job, a consequence enforced by my father anytime we (I) stayed out past curfew. 

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by Sara Flitner

I could hear her voice become guarded as she tried to return the conversation to softer ground. “You get so sharp when I’m just trying to get a word in,” she said, but I could already feel myself tensing. “I wish you would hear what I’m actually saying,” I fired back, meaning to stand my ground. 

I was talking to my closest confidant, a friend who had kept my secrets for more than 40 years. I was tired after a long week, and so was she, and things were veering into unusual territory. I could feel myself tense up when she tried to coax me into agreeing with her.

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by Sara Flitner

My son called this morning from Laramie, wisely waiting until he was already there before telling me he was going. He left at 7 p.m. for the five-and-a-half-hour drive over snowy, dark roads where elk and deer lurk by the side of road, waiting for a good time to cross. Not all of them exhibit the same sensibility. I was glad to get the travel report after the fact.

While we have had some near-misses and big dents—most famously, the time I hit a deer near Hell’s Half Acre and had to drive all the way to Jackson with the carcass stuck to the front grill of my car.

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by Sara Flitner

“How to Be Unhappy” was the title of the list I saw on Instagram, and at the very top it read, “Be right,” and “Judge.” There were lots of other things: “Blame others,” “Want more,” “Demand to be understood,” “Make happiness conditional (as in, “when I get the job/paycheck/new car…),” “Want things to be different,” and (the clincher, at least for me), “Try to control things.”

We do so many things in effort to be happy. We try to get things or avoid things, and we usually clothe ourselves in opinions about what everyone else should be doing. In short, we have believe our own thoughts about what is right.

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by Sara Flitner

When I first moved to Jackson, I walked into Jedediah’s Original House of Sourdough, and proprietor Mike Gierau hired me on the spot. My fellow waitresses and cooks had a favorite watering hole, the Log Cabin Saloon, and we gathered there for happy hour too many days of the week for me to confess.

Most of the regulars were older than me, but they were a welcoming bunch and one of my fast favorites was a man  called “Hippy Jeff” because he had a long ponytail and played tennis in shorts only, much to the delight of spectators. His trade was making the most scrumptious desserts – his lemon raspberry cake will be my last meal – and they were served in all the best restaurants in town. He worked all night, slept, and got up in time for a game of tennis or ping pong before showing up to hear the news of the day. 

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by Sara Flitner

Sitting in a conference room under dim lights, I had just finished guiding a “metta” practice for our local police. With the Chief of Police at the head of the table, flanked by burley officers on all sides, and another participant Zooming in from Star Valley, the session was part of a year-long “train the trainer” program the Jackson Police Department is piloting with Becoming Jackson Whole.  

Having already learned the core principles of mindfulness practice, our officers are now biting off a big responsibility: to broaden mindfulness and resilience training to reduce stress and turnover, and to learn effective ways to manage focus, mental health, relationships, and workplace performance. It’s a commitment that begs tough questions, asking significant introspection of our frontline peacekeepers. 

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by Sara Flitner

To witness something with full attention is to make it holy. To observe a thing’s details, its place in the world, its circumstances is to make sacred the thousands of mundane and miraculous ways that our daily lives start anew, flame out, begin again. To see and know something, to know it through paying attention to it, is one way to keep a thing alive. Because, if the essence of something goes unnoticed, can it survive?

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by Sara Flitner

On perhaps my last morning in my home of 24 years, I watched a hummingbird land in the tall aspen trees behind the house. I had decided to rent out my home and try on something different for a while, and as I watched the bird, I felt fully the possibility that I may never do it – the watching, there – again. The trees, planted as saplings, are now taller than two stories, and that morning the leaves were still green, branches full. 

Birds mean something to my two sons and me. Hummingbirds carry the energy of deep connection, because they delighted and uplifted our close friend, Shelley, as she watched them from her hospital bed in the last days of her 49 years. Over this past summer, my yard had been full of hummingbirds, and all the other messengers. Tanagers (family), lazuli buntings (beauty) grosbeaks (persistence), finches (delight in the ordinary)…The home is full of memories, created together and enclosed in our beautiful neighborhood on the creek, in my yard, in its walls, the aspen trees. 

At 11 a.m. sharp, a calvary of competent and caring women showed up at my doorstep: my college roommate, friends from the baby years, the working years, the last handful of years. Grandmothers, dog mothers, artists and executives, divorced, single, married, undecided. Four decades of ages represented. One by one, they backed Suburbans, trucks and Subarus into my driveway, and 59 minutes later, the things I loved and would carry with me were sitting in my new condo, waiting to usher me into a new era.

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