I am at a Benedictine monastery for a few days, as I do now and then. Some of the closest experiences I have had to multiple lives, or reincarnation, or whatever that is that we stuck-in-passing-time-amnesiacs have no real word for, have been in Benedictine monasteries.
You like monasteries. Have you ever visited the Camaldalese hermitage in Big Sur California? The monks live in silence in a paradisical setting a quartermile above the Pacific in the Santa Lucia mountains. I spent nine days there in a cell, taking walks in the woods and doing some serious self examination. On one of my walks i noticed a tile embedded in a fork of branches on a very old live oak. My mind was all over the place. I'd been there Five days and gotten nowhere with my examination of conscience in the form of an AA fourth step. Realizing there were words on the tile i drew nearer. the bark had grown around it, holding it like a gnarled hand. It read, "Let us be mindful of the sacrament of the present moment". It struck me like lightning. I returned to my cell and wrote my entire fourth step in a few hours.
You like monasteries. Have you ever visited the Camaldalese hermitage in Big Sur California? The monks live in silence in a paradisical setting a quartermile above the Pacific in the Santa Lucia mountains. I spent nine days there in a cell, taking walks in the woods and doing some serious self examination. On one of my walks i noticed a tile embedded in a fork of branches on a very old live oak. My mind was all over the place. I'd been there Five days and gotten nowhere with my examination of conscience in the form of an AA fourth step. Realizing there were words on the tile i drew nearer. the bark had grown around it, holding it like a gnarled hand. It read, "Let us be mindful of the sacrament of the present moment". It struck me like lightning. I returned to my cell and wrote my entire fourth step in a few hours.
You wanted to talk with the noisy and disliked man or the brother reading the book?
Nice looking place. I designed and had one built in a similar style but as a farmhouse rather than a monastery.