I was at this spiritual retreat in New England. It was in Massachusetts, to be exact. I was looking forward to this experience since my busy banker life in Manhattan keeps me away from stimulating the spiritual side of me. There were about two dozen people at this retreat. They came on their own accord. I had no idea who they were really. I found out about this place through Retreats-R-Us.com. I know I didn’t do full research, but I just wanted the bare basic retreat and in some country-like place like the western half of the Puritan State or some other quaint commonwealth.

The 2 dozen RetreatAnts, as we were called, were doing just fine. The Retreat Head Mistress gave us this name because she considered her retreat headquarters to be an ant colony where we, the RetreatAnts would collectively meditate for the thriving of our own spirituality. The queen ant, therefore was our own self-improved spirituality. Our Head Mistress had plenty of meditations for us to engage in. Some of us were put to doing Sanskrit meditation, a form of relaxing the wrists by writing in Sanskrit. They did not know the language, were not even East Asian, but they did a fine job of copying the scrolls. One of the retreat coaches concluded this was a fabulous way to achieve a clean head, which is what meditation was, according to the blonde girl who sat with me on the train as we headed there. I suppose it was impossible to not have run into a fellow RetreatAnt on the Amtrak. Oh, but, this girl was so wrapped up in love for meditation. She was a hippie’s daughter raised in the hippie ways, loving the hippie-zeitgeist. Now, I’m a banker, that is true, and I do have my conservative tendencies, being a no-hippie sort of individual, yet I must say what she spoke about relaxation of the mind really made me look forward to this adventure. Her name was Starchild, according to her.

Other RetratAnts practiced toenail clipping. Not your regular clip the toenails with a toenail clipper kind of thing, no, this was a ritual whereby it would take you five minutes to clip one toenail. There was a breathing meditation break of a minute during clipping such that it would take an hour to do all 10 toenails of your feet. You also had to keep your eyes closed throughout this exercise.

There was also the headstand meditation participants; they would stand on their heads for hours. If there were people who wanted to join them, but could not do the headstands so long, they would do foot stands, and so, would stand next to them. It was an interesting sight to see. I didn’t think much of that trick. I felt like saying to one of them, “Don’t you feel like saying: ‘Here, I’m standing. Look at me meditate’.” At least the real head-standers were doing something different.

As much as I thought I was getting something out of this experience, I was just sleeping in. Yes, would marvel at my fellow RetreatAnts, but on the whole I was just baffled by my lack of activity that I slept in almost every day, until Starchild made her way over to my bed quarters and scandalously woke me up.

It was 6AM. I must have been snoring and dreaming. Yes, I know I was dreaming, and my dream was about a praying mantis eating me alive, and yet, I was sound asleep. When the mantis was about to open her fangs, Starchild woke me up by throwing a bucket of cold water on me. I didn’t even have time to get mad as the shock almost killed me and for a moment I thought I was in the mantis’ acid filled stomach. To my surprise, it was just the cold water that came out of the bucket that Starchild threw at me.

Shocked with a loss of vocabulary, I said, “What the—!?”

She said, “There’s a fire! We must leave!”