Daily Archives: March 6, 2011

Aging, Bees, Dogs, Family, Garden, Writing

Home Is Where the Garlic Is

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Imbolc                                       Waxing Bloodroot Moon

This journey has begun to bend toward home.  I”m more eager know to go home than I was to come here when I left.  That seems good to me.  Home is the place you know you’re away from when you’re gone.  No place else on earth has that lodestone attraction for me.

Home is where the heart is, yes, and my heart is with Kate, with Vega, Rigel and Kona, with the raised bed and the garlic, the asparagus, the strawberries, with the bees and the grandkids play house, with the flower beds and the woods, with our house which, in exactly the same way a church is sanctified, has become sacred.  The life and the love,, our history there, has made it a sacred realm, a realm of the heart and a sanctuary for our life.

I have two yellow pads, one full, the other on its way, scribbled with this story of another world and these people I’ve come to know over the course of writing it.  Brag, Constance, John, Aeric, Gullen, Arton, Isaac, Cern.  Well, maybe a couple of these are speaking animals and one is a god, but they’ve come alive for me over the months I’ve spent on Missing.  Their journey, I see now, has only just begun, will only finish its first phase as this novel draws to a close in another 30,000 words or so.

This writing is and has been such a strange act for me, virtually solitary save for Kate, who has stuck with me in my up and down moments, my more confident moments and, most important, in my melancholy.  Otherwise, I’ve written these novels, these short stories and they go in a  file or in a box and sit, George Plimpton once called an unpublished work of his, A Monster In A Box.  This will be my sixth or seventh monster.

Not complaining just observing that’s been strange.

Commentary on Religion, Writing

Next to Last Day

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Imbolc                                   Waxing Bloodroot Moon

I’ve had visitors now for lunch every day.  Father Chris and I discussed being hard of hearing.  When I mentioned saying something inappropriate occasionally in noisy places, he recounted a time when a parishioner said he was going to his sister’s funeral.  That’s nice! Father Chris replied.

Brother Paul presented me with a pound of Blue Cloud Abbey honey, from one beekeeper to another.

I’ve gotten to know more of the monks on an individual basis, mostly through lunch since I spend most of my time here in the room writing and when I finish in the afternoon no one’s around.  Dinner is in silence and afterward the monks retire.

Breakfast is usually in silence although Sunday morning is not, I learned today.  The rhythm goes silent breakfast after morning prayers, then day prayer and eucharist followed by a lunch when talking is ok and a silent dinner not long after evening prayer held at 5 pm.  Vigils come at 7:30 and after it, at 10 pm, the night or grand silence.

The silence at regular intervals and the quiet in general make this a wonderful place to write.  The only noises here are bells, singing and chanting, howling wind and the occasional train.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Travel, Weather +Climate, Writing

Heading Home Tomorrow

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Imbolc                                     Waxing Bloodroot Moon

Snow has begun to come down in earnest.  I like the view out of my window here in the Bishop’s room.  Snow falls between the two pines that frame the central pane and I can see across the service road toward what I now know is the Monastery orchard.  This is a wonderful piece of land, wooded in parts, with two lakes and ample space for agriculture.  The Monastery did have a large farm at one time.

I’ve decided I’ll head home tomorrow afternoon.  I’m a bit lonely here now and I want to see Kate and the dogs.  Since I get my writing done in the morning, sometimes a bit after lunch, I can write tomorrow morning, eat lunch and head out.  That way I can be back at my desk on Tuesday morning, ready to keep on writing.

So ancientrails will hit the road around 1 pm tomorrow, driving east on Highway 12, then north on 494.

Breakfast today is at 8, not 7:30.  Feels pretty soft, writing here at 7:50 instead of dining in silence.  The Monastery is a great place to focus on writing and I think I’ll return when it comes time to revise one of my earlier works, perhaps in January.  Once I finish the first draft of Missing, I’ll have Kate read it and comment on it, perhaps Lydia, then I’ll set in a manuscript box on the shelf in my study.  6 months or so later, I’ll take it out and read it like a stranger, making the first cuts and revisions.

Though I’ve not practiced it, they say writing is in the re-writing and I believe it.