Hermitage Update: Winter, 2012, Hermitage Update

Theme: Practicing wonder

It is a brown January winter, so far. Some splashes of snow, including Christmas day several inches, but mostly, oddly, fluctuating temperatures and periodic mud. An unlikely Maine stretch.

David (Tibetan practice) visits from Antigonish. Nancy (Vipassana practice) from New Hampshire. Sam (Franciscan practice) from Connecticut. The bookshed/retreat has been warmed and welcoming.

The life of a hermitage is a quiet life. Except for the large German Shepherd who barks a storm running out from barn each time, whether 3AM, 7AM, or 9PM. He is a gentle giant with an enormous sound likely to keep all four footed and two footed creatures a little cautious. He comes that way. He's harmless. But his practice has been unswerving protectiveness of an elderly gentlewoman living alone on a hillside. We try to invite him into a more quiet greeting for this new outside. But sometimes, I admit, my greeting of the outside feels just as gruff.

We've begun an emphasis on eco-spirituality, eco-philosophy, and eco-theology on Friday Evening Conversations. David Abram, John O'Donohue, Thomas Berry, and the authors of "Care for Creation: A Franciscan Spirituality of the Earth," Ilia Delio, O.S.F., Franciscan Keith Douglass Warner, O.F.M., and Pamela Wood.

We continue to wander the middle place between traditions, the middle way between extremes, and the relational middle sanctuary of presence -- what some call the hospitality of heaven. There are no strangers there. It is an odd assortment of unique and loosely-knit pilgrims on the path of intention toward discovering self-forgetfulness with the help of generosity, compassion, and wisdom.

The Irish workman has migrated downeast. The aged farmhouse will adjust to the absence of tablesaw and Makita in the same way an aged body adjusts to the hours after rehab or exercise. It's nice to be off.

Saskia is back on the road gathering numbers for her work. I am back at my desk considering East Asian Philosophy this term. Our lives, like many lives, are side by side, respectfully (always trying) greeting each other in the meeting place between us. The task of being a hermit in the open (hito) is, as Dogen put it, "one continuous mistake." Still, we keep on.

Every once in a while, when we look around what is going on in town, we shudder with recall and curiosity about returning to the market-face of the hermitage. Most days we shrug our shoulders, shake our heads, and sober-up. And yet, we wonder.

Wonder is good medicine.

Twice a day.

Like prayer and meditation.

Good health to you!

Peace, and what is, good!