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)

A group of students at Mundelein High School have decided to experiment with months of voluntary simplicity. What exactly is voluntary simplicity you say? In the tradition of Mr. Thoreau, some people choose to withdraw from certain elements/habits of their modern society. And they wouldn’t say their withdrawal is giving up something, but instead it helps them get something back. What do they get back? The possibilities are multitudinous. They might get back time, peace of mind, a deeper sense of self, a better understanding of the world, empowerment, thoughts to explore, perspectives to write about, etc., etc.

The plan for this class is to voluntarily withdraw from something different each month. What would it be like to live without television? Sugar? Cars? Cell phones? The internet? Computers? The possibilities are endless. Each participant will also individualize each month with some of their own simplifications, withdrawals, and experiments.

~ Experiments in Voluntary Simplicity

In the prevailing conditions of daily life, individuals who are not prepared to enter into communication at any moment with their fellow men rate as difficult, antisocial and unfriendly, and are subject to social censure.

But this situation undergoes a volte-face whenever someone can present a socially sanctioned individual project as the reason for his self-isolation and renunciation of any form of communication. We all understand that when somebody has to carry out a project, he is under immense time pressure that leaves him no time whatsoever for anything else. It is commonly accepted that writing a book, preparing an exhibition or striving to make a scientific discovery are pastimes that permit the individual to avoid social contact, to discommunicate, if not to excommunicate himself – yet without automatically being judged to be a bad person.[…] What is nonetheless still expected of him is that, at least by the final moment of his life, he has some form of finished product to show for – namely, a work – that will retrospectively offer social justification for the life he has spent in isolation.

~ Boris Groys (via)

From July, 2007 to January, 2008, and April to June, 2008, James Benning constructed replicas of two cabins that have played pivotal roles in American history. The first is an exact reproduction of the cabin Henry David Thoreau built at Walden Pond in Concord, MA, in 1845.[…]

The second structure is a reproduction of Ted Kaczynski’s cabin he built in the Lincoln, Montana woods and where he was eventually arrested, after a lengthy and expensive FBI investigation, for his part in a deadly bombing campaign. Similarly to Thoreau, he had moved to the rugged, remote cabin in 1971 to learn self-sufficiency and survival skills after becoming disillusioned with mainstream society.

@ Cabin Project (via Shedworking)

As I was sitting this morning, it struck me that meditation is about as far from being an abstract pursuit as is possible. There is a popular idea of meditators as having their head in their clouds, and of meditation as an unworldly pursuit. But it seems to me that there is nothing more worldly than meditation. Not only this, but it also seems to me that a lot of what is sometimes called (although I dislike the term) “worldly” activity is, on the contrary, somewhat abstract and unworldly.

@ thinkBuddha