It Doesn't Take a City.(stress control)

I began last year as a stressed-out journalist in New York City. I never expected to begin this one as a stressed-out Buddhist shrinekeeper in the Colorado Rockies.

My latest professional challenge has been to put together a shrine representing the human senses. I went conservative on four of the five: a mirror for sight, saffron water for smell, a seashell for hearing and a piece of red satin for touch. For taste, I strove for something more imaginative--and lascivious--than a nutritious apple or vitamin-filled squash. So I filled a glass bowl with a generous helping of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

In exchange for my shrinekeeping, I enjoy a spare compensation package: food, lodging and 300 bucks a month. I live in a dirty old trailer beached on an alpine ridge about a half mile from running water, and five miles from the nearest paved road. Hearing about my new career track, my friends back East concluded I had lost my mind. Even one of my new Buddhist colleagues confronted me one night. "You have skills," he observed. "What are you doing here?"

I left New York for all the predictable reasons. My apartment was too noisy, my life too crazy. When I started meditating a couple of years ago, I found it indescribably satisfying and decided that 20 New York minutes every once in a while wasn't the way to progress. So I bought a car, headed west with no particular destination, and ended up at Shambhala Mountain Center, a retreat run by American-Tibetan Buddhists in northern Colorado, about 110km west of Ft. Collins. There was not much there except fir trees, meditators and cushions to sit on. I stayed.

Now I meditate--or, as they say around here, "practice"--whenever I can. I sit on my pillow, pay attention to my breathing and try to settle my frenetic mind. After four years at Harvard and 10 years in Manhattan, this ...