This segment (starts at 2:30) from Tony Robinson’s show Worst Jobs In History was the beginning of my forthcoming novel The Bee-Loud Glade. I’d been kicking around an idea for a monastic novel after a blog back-and-forth with AKMA a few years ago, but it wasn’t going anywhere; perhaps because I was trying to somehow write a monastic novel that wasn’t religious. Then I saw the show and said, “Aha, a hermit!” and the idea more or less came together. But only the idea; unfortunately, Tony Robinson never came round to help with the writing.

Who says TV is bad for books?

So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn’t say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can. I was told by one of her older relatives that a teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month. That’s 100 a day, or about one every 10 waking minutes, morning, noon, and night, weekdays and weekends, class time, lunch time, homework time, and toothbrushing time. So on average, she’s never alone for more than 10 minutes at once. Which means, she’s never alone.

~ William Deresiewicz @ Hermitary

Keegan Gibbs (via plsj)

“Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life — perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it. It has no technique and therefore no authority.”

~ J. Krishnamurti
(via whiskey river)

In contemporary civilization where everything is standardized and where everything is repeated, the whole point is to forget in the space between an object and its duplication. If we didn’t have this power of forgetfulness, if art today didn’t help us to forget, we would be submerged, drowned under those avalanches of rigorously identical objects.

~ John Cage (via Hermitary)

That was all, he held his peace. And since Seraphin was no longer speaking either, around the two men there slowly grew a strange thing, inhuman, and in the end unbearable — Silence. A silence of the high mountains, a silence of unpeopled spaces, where man comes but rarely, and where if by chance he falls silent himself, he may listen all he will, but all that he can hear is that there is nothing to hear.

It is as if nothing exists any more anywhere, from us to the other end of the world, from us to the furthest reach of the sky. Nothing, the abyss, the void; the annihilation of self; as if the world were not yet created, or had ceased to exist; as if it was before the beginning of the world, or after its end. And anguish dwells in your throat, and a hand is slowly contracting around your heart.

A lucky chance if just then the fire starts to crackle, or a drop of water falls, or perhaps a little wind brushes the roof. The slightest little sound is a great sound. The drop of water reverberates as it falls. The burning wood cracks like a pistol shot, and the brushing of the wind is enough all by itself to fill the immensity of space. All the tiny sounds that are really loud… they recur… they fill the cup of silence. Life begins again because of the living sounds.

~ CF Ramuz, When The Mountain Fell

In their heavy beards and black garb — worn to signify their death to the world — the monks seem to recede into a Byzantine fresco, an ageless brotherhood of ritual, acute simplicity, and constant worship, but also imperfection. There is an awareness, as one elder puts it, that “even on Mount Athos we are humans walking every day on the razor’s edge.”

@ National Geographic (via)

Although I have tried meditating for shorter or longer stretches since my college days, forty years ago, I have never been systematic about the practice, nor have I ever been good at quieting what Buddhists call the “monkey mind.” Here beside Lookout Creek, however, far from my desk and duties, with no task ahead of me but that of opening myself to this place, I settle quickly. I begin by following my breath, the oldest rhythm of flesh, but soon I am following the murmur of the creek, and I am gazing at the bright leaves of maples and dogwoods that glow along the thread of the stream like jewels on a necklace, and I am watching light gleam on water shapes formed by current slithering over rocks, and for a spell I disappear, there is only this rapt awareness.

~ Scott Russell Sanders

Each month Another New Calligraphy celebrates simplicity through the microzine Shepherd’s Check, an exercise in how the small and the quiet can pierce the grand white noise of everyday life to create a gleaming voice of honesty and strength. ANC loves thoughtful, well-planned communication in which nothing is lost and nothing is unnecessary, whether that communication be a short, short story about a volcano, an unadorned expression of love, or frantic directions to the nearest emergency room. Being no more than 99 characters, the pieces featured in any issue of Shepherd’s Check are diverse and may have nothing in common other than their deceptive might.

I have a hut in the woods, none knows it but my Lord; an ash tree this side, a hazel on the other, a great tree on a mound encloses it. Two heathery door posts for support, and a lintel of honeysuckle; around its close the wood sheds its nuts upon fat swine. The size of my hut, small yet not small, a place of familiar paths, the she-bird in its dress of blackbird colour sings a melodious strain from its gable.

~ from Hermit and King, quoted in Trees by Richard Hayman

Most of us don’t herd goats anymore. Go far enough back in time, and a whole lot of humans did.

Brad Kessler left a rent-controlled apartment in New York’s East Village to raise goats in Vermont. He took it seriously — even spiritually — for himself, and now for us, in the pages of a wondrous little book on goat-herding.

There’s a reason, he writes, that Jesus, Moses, Krishna and Mohammed were all tied up with shepherds. There’s something magic here. And the cheese is pretty divine, too.

~ On Point Radio (via)