Imbolc                                  Waning Bridgit Moon

The monks and individual retreatants like me all eat together in a long, tiled room.  There are six long wooden tables, a blond wood reflecting the era when the Abbey was built.  These tables sit at a slight diagonal to the western wall, mostly below ground level, only narrow windows above letting in light.

Trays, the blue plastic kind familiar to me from Alexandria Elementary School over 55 years ago, come up first with the silvered racks for tableware above them.  A steam table is next, roughly the size of the one Kam Wong’s Chinese restaurant has for its afternoon crowd in Andover.  Butted up against the steam table is another long wooden table on which sat this morning plastic bags of bread baked here in the monastery.

I picked up some creamed wheat–makes me think of the bear opening the creamed wheat crates in the Art Institutes American collection–brown bread, spread the bread with a little peanut butter, a tangerine and took my tray to the retreatants table.  After putting some milk in my cereal and getting some tea, all along the southern wall, I returned to the the table, eating my second meal here in silence.

Monks came in and out, some dressed in black robes, others in jeans and work shirts.

While eating, I looked up from time to time.  Above my chair was a painted crucifix with the words, God Rules from a Tree.  On the eastern wall, above the steam table, there is a long panel that contains the four symbols of the gospels:  Ox, Eagle, Lion and Angel.  In between each symbol is a graphic and words like:  Happy is he who is hungry.

We ate, the monks and I, in quiet, the only sounds an occasional chair scuffing the floor or silver ware against plastic.  The mood invited mindfulness so I imagined the field in which the wheat for bread and the cereal had grown.  The fall day on which it was harvested.  A barn full of Holsteins, water vapor steaming off them in the warm barn while they were milked.  The sunny vineyard in California where these grapes had grown fat and full of the water dried from them now.  Maybe a sugar beet field along the Red River or a sugar cane field in Hawai’i for the sugar.  I didn’t get as far as the tangerine and the tea and the peanut butter as my mind drifted, no longer mindful.

Now I’m warming up for the morning’s work, writing this piece.

From the Benedictine Monastery, Blue Cloud Abbey, near Marvin, South Dakota.