Once Upon a Summer Solstice

An experience, unmatched in the decades since, occurred in 1973 on the night of the summer solstice, a night which featured an exceptional full moon. For an instant, I found the infinite in my finiteness, my significant but small self was part of something grander than anything I’d ever imagined. This happened after my third year in graduate school. I’d left an unsettled world dominated by war, racial tension, social unrest, and income inequality to try and find myself and make sense out of a world spinning out of control.

This was how I came to arrive on an island near Tacoma, Washington, where I would undergo a voluntary, intensive psychotherapy experience. Affectionately called HIT (House of Intensive Therapy), the small two-story structure on Fox Island became my home for three weeks. From the roof’s vantage point I had a spectacular, unobstructed view of Mount Rainier, and off to the right of its glacial summit, a glorious full moon. I’d never before, nor have I since, felt so tiny in the midst of an expansive universe. Though I was reminded of that moment when a rare “strawberry” full moon graced the sky on the evening of this year’s summer solstice.

The Algonquian people, a large Native American tribe, believed the reddish moon signaled the beginning of the harvest of ripening strawberries. Among the peoples in the Mayan culture the “strawberry-colored” moon, at the longest day of the year, had special significance for their sacrificial practices.

My time in solitary residence at HIT—isolated days with no human contact except for a weekday two-and-a-half hour therapy session on a couch—involved both sacrifice and a wish to nurture my soul. On weekends I had no therapy appointments, but continued the solitary lifestyle that in addition to no human contact required abstinence from all forms of stimulants, alcohol, books and other entertaining media. I gave up (my sacrifice) tobacco, weed, cold beers, beloved reading materials, music, and engagements with locals to “feed” my soul’s hunger for a healthier life in which anger, rebelliousness, and thumbing my nose at authority would be muted if not steered in more constructive directions.

My psychic wounds were laid bare. I was ready to address brokenness from my childhood and patterns of destructive behaviors. But that said, I naively thought I’d “arrived” at the soul-healed pot-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow when I boarded the plane to reenter society, when in fact HIT merely had been a way station.

During the first weekend, a time of acclimation to HIT, I indulged in activities that would be forbidden on Monday morning when I commenced treatment at 5:30. My purchases at the off-island market included necessary staples like water, juice, milk, cereal, frozen vegetables, peanut butter, bread, meats, ground coffee, a case of Olympia beer, and three packs of Marlboro cigarettes.

When my therapist, John, showed up unannounced on the front doorstep Sunday afternoon I met him with a beer and cigarette in hand, pleasantly buzzed yet openly combative. He wisely returned to his car after I refused him entry and demanded that he leave. “We start tomorrow!” I declared before slamming the door in his face. I watched him from the living room window. He waved and drove off without saying a word.

I have no recollection of that first Monday morning session, but I suspect we gently addressed the previous day’s event. I had requested that we tape the thirty-seven and a half hours of therapy hoping to use the material for my dissertation. John was enthusiastic for the project, and though it never became a reality I did listen to the tapes several times. My eagerness to explore and learn about my inner world, and his capacity to listen and take me in made for a beneficial experience. I didn’t, however, entirely lose my combative self. For example, there was the “toenail-clipping incident.”

John had an awful habit of clipping his toenails during sessions, something I’d been warned about by previous attendees who’d tolerated this. The first time he began this pedicure practice in one of our sessions I rebuked him. In the tape you can hear, in a moment of silence, the click of his nail clipper, the sound of the nail-clipping hitting the wood floor and my loud response: “Stop it!” He did.

The sessions and journaling I did during the three weeks opened my soul to dark spaces I’d avoided. I maintained compliance with the “monastic and silent” practice to which I’d agreed, but within a few days felt claustrophobic in HIT.

And so began my rooftop adventure.

The extension ladder by the side of the house planted the seed for resolving closed-in feelings. The steeply slanted roof presented a challenge, but once seated on the shingled surface I realized I could sit or lie on the rough surface, breathe deeply, and enjoy the freedom of being in a place and space without “walls.” Every day while a HIT resident, I spent time on the south-facing roof, looking to the east at Mount Rainier. On the few occasions when a thunderstorm passed through, altering the plan, I climbed to the upper rungs on the ladder and took in the overcast sight from there.

Looking inward became tethered to my rooftop embrace of belonging to something greater and more mysterious than anything I’d imagined. I became aware of how finite I was while attentive to an infinite world in which I had a place. The expansive inner explorations of my therapy sessions and journaling, solitary runs on the beach or walks through the woods were no less spacious than the infinite vistas I encountered from my perch on the roof. That which had been claustrophobic became airy. The explorations in the landscapes of my inner and outer worlds entailed risk—“falling off” in either one could occur—something I learned to embrace with a fearlessness I’d not known before.

I knew the moon was 252,088 miles away, and Mount Rainier distant, but both seemed palpably close and within reach, in much the same way that the elusive brokenness in my soul began to fall into my grasp allowing healing to occur.

Years passed. The attributions I clung to (from the HIT experience) about “getting it,” or “having arrived” faded as wounds resurfaced, brokenness seeped into my daily life, and a world of meanness and violence tore at my heart. But the memory, the view from the roof, retains its vibrant place in my soul giving me hope when I lose faith in myself and humankind.

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