THAT SATURDAY AFTERNOON, the world felt still as a reflection of itself. I stepped out of the dining hall into our backyard and the wet spring air was sweet. Low clouds rumbled with distant cracks of thunder and the river was swelled with the recent downpours. Our big white gazebo, set back perfectly about 10 feet from the river, was unmoving and called the scene to focus like a painting.

My good friend Jim Reilly was standing against the picnic table serene as always. I lit one of his cigarettes. We smoked for a while, appreciating the isolation that for central New Jersey is a miracle; it was hard to believe that just across the Raritan River was the town of Somerset, one of the fastest over-developing municipalities in the state.

Sometimes you could hear the distant roar of traffic beyond the treeline, outlining the sensation that our building and grounds were some kind of misplaced Eden.

I was grateful Jim was around because I needed to talk to somebody who had all their marbles. Jim ran a Thursday night Course in Miracles discussion group in Brooklyn, and was my first friend after graduating from college. He was visiting our community for a few days to conduct a workshop called "Weekend of Listening," to which people other than residents were invited. With our building and grounds, a former convent set on six acres of woods and lawns located an hour from New York City, we had the perfect setup for workshops and retreats. But no one had registered up for this one, and about half of those of us who lived here were away for the weekend.

"A really strange thing happened," I said after a while, and tried to put the thoughts together in a way in which I wasn't the center of the story. Jim finished his cigarette and put it out.

"Vickie just asked me if I was going to buy her dresser. I was supposed to have made a decision by yesterday because she needs the money, but I never got back to her because she hasn't been around. I told her I didn't have the money right now, and that she could sell it to somebody else.

"She looked like she was furious but trying to keep it bottled up, and said, 'Alright...no...it's no...problem...' and turned suddenly and ran up the stairs, fuming, actually fuming. I could hear her. Then Rosalie walked in the kitchen and informed me out of nowhere that Vickie is planning on checking herself into a psychiatric hospital."

"That's what I heard from Rosalie, too," Jim said. It had a somber feel to it. We watched the brown river tumble by, carrying off branches and other natural junk that gets washed off the land when it pours like it had been lately.

I let this psychiatric hospital stuff sink in, doing my best not to resist it. I felt self-conscious about making a big deal out of it, and tried to recognize that it was just another normal thing for this life. There's a history of psychiatric illness in my family, and I understood that when people get brittle sometimes it's a good idea to deal with it professionally. This is sometimes an idea alien to a lot of folks, like people who talk seriously about Men in White Suits.

What alarmed me was that Vickie was always the dedicated and strong one in the community, the one who was consistently there to handle the responsibilities nobody else wanted. For example, she had recently re-sorted and re-ordered, practically by herself, an entire 2,000 letter bulk mailing that had been done wrong the first time. And she was always willing to deal with Mario, the landlord, who was rarely willing to work easily with anyone.

Basically I saw a lot of myself in her, and knew some of the feelings I was capable of, and the whole situation bothered me.

From inside the second floor hallway window overhead I heard a knock on a door and a voice; Daniel's voice, "Vickie, is everything alright?"

Vickie's room was right upstairs and the window was open. She asked him to go away. It was like listening to a play.

"Really, Vickie, I need to know if you're okay. We're worried about you. Can I come in?" Then she told him to go away, and told him not to bother her any more.

"Really, Vickie, you can talk to me..." Dan must have opened the door because suddenly it slammed violently, and with a piercing 10-second scream Vickie bleated, "Go away! Get out of here! Leave...me...alone!"

The door slammed again and Vickie started screaming wildly for him to go away. It was astonishing. I had never heard a person scream like that, literally chilling. Her voice was cracking up and was barely recognizable. I considered how the neighbors, only a few hundred feet away, would react if they heard it.

Then Rosalie, who was audibly quite angry, said something about calling the police, which instantly struck me as stupid. They were the ones causing the disturbance. After about half a minute it all paused like a sudden halt of gunfire; Jim and I looked at each other. There was obviously nothing we could do. Vickie didn't want company, something that, if Dan and Rosalie hadn't figured out earlier, should've been fairly obvious by now.

It was quiet, in this tense way that builds with every second of silence as you wait for the next eruption.

We waited. I lit one of Jim's Marlboros and sucked the smoke down like it was oxygen. I could no longer identify with Vickie. It was still dead quiet and suddenly I was even happier that Jim would be around for the weekend. And I was glad that there was no workshop going on; though it seemed that fortunate little coincidences like this happened all the time around here.

I asked Jim if there was something he thought we should be doing, even though I knew the answer; reality testing, my mother calls it. He said no, he would just let things settle down and see what happened next.


I HEADED up to my room and wrote down a few notes in my Chronicle notebook. I wrote down a few factual things, and then commented:

The Vickie Episode, like the thunder and the strange stillness in the air today, and Bill, the groundskeeper and the gardens he tends, and the pony, are all just symbols: external symbols for what is happening in the universe within. It's so obvious now I can't believe I don't see it all the time. Though there is the silent acknowledgement that something, though it's hard to say for sure what, is happening beyond the usual everyday experience...

What happened next I observed on the way downstairs, and that was Vickie speeding her car out the driveway. That was that. She was on her own. I still had to fight this feeling that unless I was doing something I wasn't acting responsibly. It all seemed so serious: the thought of someone checking into a psychiatric hospital for what I figured was a nervous breakdown of some kind.

Rosalie, I learned later, had called the police, but apparently Vickie was gone by the time they got there. Dan was in the chapel, according to Rosalie, meditating to send Vickie healing energy. Rosalie always seemed to be offering what she thought was the latest important information, and for the first time in my life the idea of gossip annoyed me. Yet I was as curious as anybody about what was happening.

Patrick, who had been through some truly intense experiences in Vietnam during the peak years of the war, was just taking it all in going about his business. I knew that compared to some of what he'd seen this was no big deal.

Todd, two-day-new member of the household and the only person with any professional psychological training, told me he believed Vickie was not an unstable person, and that she would be fine; not to worry. Take care of myself, he said. He added, and Patrick agreed, that the very dramatic quality of the whole episode put it in the category of "a very loud calling out for love," one which Todd had a hunch she was fully aware of and had planned almost consciously.

He asked if I thought we should get together as a group and talk things over. Having the availability of a support group was a key reason we had moved in together and formed what we called a healing community. I said I thought it was a perfectly natural subject to have a meeting about, but it didn't happen until the regular Sunday night meeting the next evening, when we were forced to deal with it collectively. We had been having some problems lately functioning as a household, as a group entity. Todd had noticed this immediately, and said he might not be around long because of it.

If the collective entity wasn't functioning, the archetypal Grapevine was. Talk going around was: Vickie had been debating, for the past few days, "which plane of reality was better" for her; she had been spending a lot of time on "the mothership" lately; she'd been talking about suicide and would be checking herself into a psychiatric hospital; that Janet, who had just come out of drug rehab, had stopped by and picked up some of Vickie's clothes and her vast crystal collection and would be taking her over to Rutgers University's psychiatric ward right up the road.


TODD PACKED his things and left Sunday afternoon. It struck me as funny that the shrink was taking off.

The Weekend of Listening concluded with the regular Sunday night meeting. Daniel and I suggested that it be held in the chapel instead of the lounge because the chapel was a more spiritually oriented environment, which we needed. Someone rang the chimes and we collected there.

We sat down in our usual circle, about eight of us including Jim and his friend Rica. We knew what we had to talk about, and why.

Dan admitted that he had handled himself poorly the day before. He had a way of just admitting he was wrong and that was that, no hard feelings either way.

Rosalie said nothing, but was so visibly shaken and exhausted -- almost catatonic -- that it looked like she was the one who needed some serious help. She just sat in her chair wrapped in a blanked and dozed off, giving the impression she was annoyed about having to be there.

I commented that it seemed provocative to see a person who was respected for her strength and stability lose it in a big way, just fall apart. It could happen to anybody. I said that as a community that had gathered for the reasons we had, our reactions to what happened were as important as what happened. This somehow led to a discussion about the present condition and the future of the community, in recognition of the ongoing leadership crisis. Somebody mentioned that Todd had packed up and left, leaving a message for us: "The Manor consists of a very fascinating group of individuals, but there is no group entity."

The discussion shifted to a general clearing session.

Ginger said to Rosalie: "I never felt I could bridge the gap between you as a person and the you who I can never walk past without hearing about the milk being left out or the floor needing mopping. How can I get past that?"

Rosalie: "Clean the floor."

Patrick: "The form of the community may change, but what we came here to do will follow us wherever we are. When I leaned to tolerate extreme emotional crisis in myself, I began to freak out less easily. I'm not even sure I still can freak out... If we really are going to be serious about healing deeply then some of the things that are going to come up are going to be heavy. We can give power to them by resisting and fighting, or we can allow the storms to blow up and then blow out. Some of the people dealing with Vickie didn't give her the room to blow out her storm."

Scott: "How much responsibility am I going to take in my relationship when logistics say I should take 50 percent? As one person in a community I should take 1/12 responsibility for what happens here. Let's take back our power and not give it to a 'community'...we have to learn to separate our peace from being a club. Until we recognize that, we have no business answering any community-related question."

Then he added, regarding Vickie: "Healing is the release from fear."

Then Patrick added; "There are some very interesting people coming out of mental hospitals."

Rica: "...and going in."

==

Gratitude

whose melody
poetry meter and rhyme
steady from moment to minute to time
with unrelenting syncopation
span the hour and the afternoon
borne in the air and bearing the air
carry the Word in each voice that I hear
walk in my step
awake in my sleep
correct each digression
uphold my decision despite the debate
each moment of freedom
ascending my weight