Imbolc Waning Bridgit Moon
Today I took my nap at 10 am. Slept for an hour. Felt refreshed the rest of the day. Strange.
At around 2 pm I grew stale in my writing so I went downstairs, strapped on my snowshoes and went for another aerobic adventure on the grounds here. The Abbey has two lakes, though I saw only one, the one on which the agnosic psychiatrist lives. She suffers from an inability to remember faces.
She told Father Tom that if she met in the mall in Sioux City, she wouldn’t recognize him until he spoke. I’m not sure how long she’s been here, but it’s a while. She lives here as a hermit in a small house provided by the Abbey.
Father Tom and I ate lunch together and he mused about women being “more relational.” He quickly added that might be a bit of a generalization, but buttressed his point with a story about the every third meeting between Benedictine Abbots and Prioresses.
As a former Abbot, Father Tom, a short man with wiry white hair and an athlete’s nervous energy, was among the Abbots when they decided to begin meeting with the Prioresses. The Prioresses, he said, wanted to meet every year, but the men said, “Noooo. Every three years is plenty.” Even on the third year, Father Tom went on, the Prioresses show up a day or two early and leave a day or two after the men.
I’m beginning to like the silence that really begins at supper at extends through breakfast. It gives a time for renewal, meditation, contemplation or relaxation. Woolly Bill Schmidt sent an e-mail suggesting that the reason for the silence might be found in these closing lines from Yogananda:
You can wander through the universe incognito;
You can make vassals of the gods;
You can be ever youthful;
You can walk on water and live in fire;
But control of the mind is better and more difficult.
As for me, I think it may be way to calm disputatious monks. Like me, if I were a monk.