Collins, Paldrom Catharine: Girl in a Box

An Oklahoma girl's years of immersion in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery

Girl in a Box: Seeking Enlightenment as a Tibetan Buddhist Nun chronicles a five-year immersion in the paradigm-altering world of a Tibetan retreat center in New York's Hudson Valley. It weaves flashbacks of Collins' former life with her ongoing attempts to surrender to monastic life. She travels to India with her teacher, takes vows as a nun, then returns to life at the monastery where she works as a house cleaner days and evenings to earn money to attend a dreamed-of three-year retreat. In her struggle to become a stellar nun, she conducts a one-sided jealous rivalry with a beautiful and perfect young nun whom she later discovers is hiding a shocking secret. She also describes the grueling practice of performing over 100,000 prostrations and her disillusionment upon learning of the imperfect humanity of her revered teachers.

As the underlying grace of those years spent with the Tibetans come into focus, Collins sees that she is like a girl who packs her suitcase and sets off down the road only to discover she has nowhere to go. What she is seeking the very home she longs for has been right there all along. Hiding in plain sight; masked in a cloak of the suffering she so longs to escape. Overlooked. Because, as the Tibetans teachit's too simple, too obvious, too close.