Journal entry, 2004: Anticipating a Transition

In my Vermont house, 2004

Last Wednesday I sat down to write something in my journal, and noticed that it was the 500th page of the file that I had begun in April 2004. Coincidentally, the journal begins with a quote from Merton: on Tuesday night my short talk to the meditation group had been about Merton, too, so he was on my mind.

Here's that journal entry from 2004; later I'll post what I wrote there the other day.

April 26, 2004

In winter the stripped landscape of Nelson County looks terribly poor. We are the ones who are supposed to be poor; well, I am thinking of the people in a shanty next to the Brandeis plant, on Brook Street, Louisville. We had to wait there while Reverend Father was getting some tractor parts. The woman who lived in this place was standing out in front of it, shivering in some kind of rag, while a suspicious-looking anonymous truck unloaded some bootleg coal in her yard. I wondered if she had been warm yet this winter. And I thought of Gethsemani where we are all steamed up and get our meals, such as they are, when meal time comes around, and where I live locked up in that room with incunabula and manuscripts that you wouldn’t find in the home of a millionaire! Can’t I ever escape from being something comfortable and prosperous and smug? The world is terrible, people are starving to death and freezing and going to hell with despair and here I sit with a silver spoon in my mouth and write books and everybody sends me fan-mail telling me how wonderful I am for giving up so much. I’d like to ask them, what have I given up, anyway, except headaches and responsibilities?

Next time I am sulking because the chant is not so good in the choir I had better remember the people who live up the road. The funny thing is, though, they could all be monks if they wanted to. But they don’t. I suppose, somehow, even to them, the Trappist life looks hard!

--Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas, pg 149. An entry from January 8, 1949.

Late winter woods, Vermont, 2004

It’s a grey, dark day here, and when we woke there was rain pelting against the roof. The storm has let up now, and in the bathroom the rainwater is slowing sliding down the incline of the skylight, blurring the silhouettes of the bare-branched treetops. This is the sort of weather that has been depressing me all through the late winter, but today it seems almost indescribably beautiful. It is practically the last day for bare trees; leaf buds are swelling on all the red maples and the honeysuckles are already covered with a cloud of pale green. On the apple tree outside the bedroom window, drops of water hang from the ends of each black twig, daring both gravity and time.

In less than a week, we’re heading to Montreal to live for a month. This will be the longest amount of time I’ve spent in a city in my half-century of life. We’re going as a change from the life we’ve led here, from the house we’ve inhabited for more than 25 years, from the rural countryside, from the particular web of responsibilities and patterns we’ve woven. Besides being urban, Montreal is an international city: proudly and gracefully maintaining its French heritage and a broad ethnic and cultural diversity despite its proximity to the United States and the English-speaking provinces of Canada. It is a mere three-and a half-hours from here, and a world apart.

We’ve been thinking of this month as an experiment. After several years of weekend trips and the occasional week-long stay we want to find out what our commitment to this city really is: how much do we really like living there, and what might that mean for our future? This is what I thought the month was going to be about: practical matters, finding out how we felt, considering some changes and potential investments at this gently teetering point of midlife.  Strange, then, that on this wet dark morning I felt, for the first time in several years, a strong call to contemplation. Could it be that part of this journey might be a sort of retreat, bizarre though it seems to retreat to a city? And yet I feel the call so clearly, bidding me to use the coming time and change of place not for distraction and escape, or merely for outward life decisions, but to learn something inner and as yet unrevealed.

For those who believe in God and believe, further, that She has a sense of humor, consider the irony of moving a writer - especially one steeped in the ultimate contemplativeness of rural Vermont life, complete with clapboard-clad house and vegetable garden, and a pervasive silence punctuated only by bird and cricket - to the bustle and endless distraction of a city of three million souls for the purpose of contemplation. Funny, even preposterous. But that’s what may be happening. I’ve been on this winding, unpredictable, and largely dusty spiritual path for long enough now to recognize the changes and imperatives when they come - and for the most part, they have come like this, of the blue.

What immediately fits is the fact that contemplative solitude, for me, is actually easier to find in the city. Having lived my entire life in the fishbowls of small towns, where I cannot step outside my door or buy a bag of carrots without running into someone who knows me, the anonymity of the city is a huge relief. It creates a sense of freedom that is impossible for me here. Perhaps because of living so many years in the country, close to nature, solitude -- for me -- is not dependent on silence, but on being removed from the obligation to talk, interact, and plan. And yet, being a social creature and a moderate extrovert, and knowing that my husband – the opposite - likes to take off for long periods of photographic exploration on his own, I’ve been a little worried about having to deal with too much solitude during an entire month of urban living. “Use it,” I hear now. “It’s a gift.”

This morning there’s much that I don’t understand. Is this simply an emotional reaction to the Merton I’ve been reading – the kind of excited, creative impulse I often feel when reading or seeing something that inspires me, but which afterwards reveals itself as just that – a kind of steamed-up excitement that quickly evaporates when I steps out into the daily reality of life? Or is it the real thing, which, if I follow it out, will lead me somewhere I’m meant to go? And in that case, what was that decision to pick up Merton during Holy Week? How do we ever know these things? All I know is that certain books have leapt off shelves into my hands for years, and changed me, and changed the course of my life and my thinking. What I suspect is that in this case, choosing to read this particular volume of Merton again was a sign that I was entering into a psychological place that was receptive to contemplation. What I didn’t do was connect it to the upcoming travel. And whether that happens or not depends on my assent to the invitation.

Comments

[Frances/Materfamilias]

so interesting to read this as I'm on the cusp of transition myself -- and wanting for time for contemplative solitude is a wish that may be granted in retirement, but I'm also moving toward a possible move to (more time in, if not full-time) the city, and more time with family. . .
Quiet and discernment seem key, and I much appreciate the reminders you post here of the relationship of those two elements to each other. And your thoughtfulness.
Thank you.

[Duchesse]

I too have found the anonymity of a city freeing after a small-town youth; seeing every kind of humanity reminds me of how I am connected to all, not just the homogeneity of my hometown population.
And, knowing how this story ultimately unfolded, seeing your art, reading your writing, I am grateful you heard that voice and took the leap.

[Martine]

Reading this, I realize how your decision to move out of the familiar to a more urban environment could have taken you somewhere else than Montreal and then we would have never met. Comme c'est fragile et précieux, une rencontre... I'm glad you chose to come here. I'm glad Montreal managed to charm you and convince you that it could be your home.

And I'm glad you keep on blogging :-)