happy solstice, luigi
I think its in the Guide to Kulchur, but Ezra Pound wrote somewhere that "if I had grown up in the same town as my grandad, I would have known more about life at 17 than I did at 30." Even if I've never been all that close with my Dad, I've always been close to my grandfather, Papa, and in an odd way, I feel myself growing closer to him in my past twenty days on a Trappist monastery.
Growing up on a cattle ranch is helping me all over the place here. Br. John has spotted in me what he calls "a mechanical aptitude," which for someone with a liberal arts degree is the equivalent of being called a fully formed human being. My grandparents are about as far apart skills wise as any two people could be- when my Granny read T. S. Eliot, Papa called him "T.ough S.hit," and while he invested in stocks and cattle, she read books on FDR and convinced him to vote for George McGovern. I've always envied Papa's patient, caring "mechanical aptitude," and to be accused of a glimmer of it myself makes me very thankful for having spent the mornings of my childhood riding around on hay trucks and spreading hay for cattle.
I worked in the woods this morning in what was a fruit orchard, until about sixty years ago. All the wild cherries are in season, and I stopped at a tree in a clearing to look for the small red fruits. I heard a rustling behind the tree line, and instead of my work partner Mark, out loped four large does, healthy and graceful. Two bounded quickly down the hillside below me, and the other pair worked cautiously above me, no more than twenty feet away.
My favorite thing about the Trappists is their rugged intellectualism. I come back into the refectory after a shower and midday prayers, my arms heavy and tired from the large pack I've been tracking around the hills, and before we line up for burritos, the reader starts Dead Man Walking, by Sr. Helen Prejean. Not to over-romanticize the life, but in a sense being a Trappist here is like being a religious and collectivist cowboy, running out among the hills, working by hand daily, rising before the sun and going to bed with it. In the meantime, you spend hours in quiet or reading.
When I told Granny about how I spend my days here, working and reading and praying, she gave a little laugh, and said sweetly, "well, then why don't you have my life? That sounds like being a housewife!" She's right of course; a lot of the appeal to this life is that it reminds me of my childhood, and Granny does have a Dust Bowl Benedictinism in her bones. Not formally, but in her way she's taken vows of stability and charity.
I've more or less decided to stay in Portland next year. I had an offer to go down South with the JVC, and though it sounds strange to say it, I think I need to slow down. I've been praying about this a lot lately, and as I sat in the zendo yesterday, I realized that it takes greater strength to stay somewhere than run away.
Besides, I've been on one helluva run. In the past six months, I've gotten lost in a snowstorm in Central Park with my hero, split a Budweiser in the Appenines with an Italian hermit, met the Italian Prime Minister, prayed with Sufis on the Thames, graduated from college, and now have started seeing the girl of my dreams. I leave for Mexico in seventeen days. Why not just ride this one out.
Growing up on a cattle ranch is helping me all over the place here. Br. John has spotted in me what he calls "a mechanical aptitude," which for someone with a liberal arts degree is the equivalent of being called a fully formed human being. My grandparents are about as far apart skills wise as any two people could be- when my Granny read T. S. Eliot, Papa called him "T.ough S.hit," and while he invested in stocks and cattle, she read books on FDR and convinced him to vote for George McGovern. I've always envied Papa's patient, caring "mechanical aptitude," and to be accused of a glimmer of it myself makes me very thankful for having spent the mornings of my childhood riding around on hay trucks and spreading hay for cattle.
I worked in the woods this morning in what was a fruit orchard, until about sixty years ago. All the wild cherries are in season, and I stopped at a tree in a clearing to look for the small red fruits. I heard a rustling behind the tree line, and instead of my work partner Mark, out loped four large does, healthy and graceful. Two bounded quickly down the hillside below me, and the other pair worked cautiously above me, no more than twenty feet away.
My favorite thing about the Trappists is their rugged intellectualism. I come back into the refectory after a shower and midday prayers, my arms heavy and tired from the large pack I've been tracking around the hills, and before we line up for burritos, the reader starts Dead Man Walking, by Sr. Helen Prejean. Not to over-romanticize the life, but in a sense being a Trappist here is like being a religious and collectivist cowboy, running out among the hills, working by hand daily, rising before the sun and going to bed with it. In the meantime, you spend hours in quiet or reading.
When I told Granny about how I spend my days here, working and reading and praying, she gave a little laugh, and said sweetly, "well, then why don't you have my life? That sounds like being a housewife!" She's right of course; a lot of the appeal to this life is that it reminds me of my childhood, and Granny does have a Dust Bowl Benedictinism in her bones. Not formally, but in her way she's taken vows of stability and charity.
I've more or less decided to stay in Portland next year. I had an offer to go down South with the JVC, and though it sounds strange to say it, I think I need to slow down. I've been praying about this a lot lately, and as I sat in the zendo yesterday, I realized that it takes greater strength to stay somewhere than run away.
Besides, I've been on one helluva run. In the past six months, I've gotten lost in a snowstorm in Central Park with my hero, split a Budweiser in the Appenines with an Italian hermit, met the Italian Prime Minister, prayed with Sufis on the Thames, graduated from college, and now have started seeing the girl of my dreams. I leave for Mexico in seventeen days. Why not just ride this one out.