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New Year's DarknessThe year struggles with its own blackness.Dark, wet mush of snow under frozen rain for two days. Everything is curtained in purple greyness and ice. Fog gets in the throat. A desolation of wetness and waste, turning to mud.Only New Year's Day was bright. Very cold. Everything hard and sparkling, trees heavy with snow. I went for a walk up the side of the Vineyard Knob, on the road to the fire tower, in secret hope of "raising the sparks" (as the Hassidim say), and they rose a little. It was quiet, but too bright, as if this celebration belonged not to the New Year or to any year.More germane to this new year is darkness, wetness, ice and cold, the scent of illness.But maybe this is good. Who can tell?The morning was dark, with a harder bluer darkness than yesterday. The hills stood out stark and black, the pines were black over thin pale sheets of snow. A more interesting and tougher murkiness. Snowflakes began to blow when I went down to the monastery from the hermitage, but by 10:30 the sun was fairly out and it was rapidly getting colder.Evening--new moon--snow hard crackling and squealing under my rubber boots. The dark pines over the hermitage. The graceful black fans and branches of the tall oaks between my field and the monastery. I said Compline and looked at the cold valley and tasted its peace. Who is entitled to such peace? I don't know. But I would be foolish to leave it for no reason.January 3 and 4, 1968, VII.32-33
Being Alive and AwakeI got up to the hermitage about nightfall. Wonderful silence, saying Compline gently and slowly with a candle burning before the icon of our Lady. A deep sense of peace and truth, that this was the way things are supposed to be, that I was in my right mind for a change (around the community I am seldom in my right mind). Total absence of care and agitation. Slept wonderfully well, even thought there was a great pandemonium of dogs in the woods when I got up about 12:20 and went out to pee off the edge of the porch.I thought I could hear the bell for Vigils at the monastery and didn't. However, I woke up soon after that and lit the fire and said Lauds quietly, slowly, thoughtfully, sitting on the floor. I felt very much alive, and real, and awake, surrounded by silence and penetrated by truth. Wonderful smell of predawn woods and fields in the cold night!October 13, 1964, V.154
Holiness and the Daily Round
Last night, at moonrise (the moon is full) a doe was out in the field again. She has become quite used to me. I walked about saying Compline in front of the hermitage and she was not disturbed, even came down the field towards me! I only hope this tameness is wisely confined to one association: with the white hermitage and the monk in black and white, without a rifle. There is no question that I really feel I am living a saner and better life in the hermitage. I would not exchange this for anything, even though for four days a snake was living in the jakes. (I finally persuaded him to go elsewhere, I hope!) In spite of the hornets, the noise of the machines in the field, the dogs and hunters, etc. All this is plain ordinary reality without any need of ideology or explanation. It is. That is enough. In the monastery everything has to be justified because everything is very seriously under question. Here only I am under question, and it is right for me to face the doubt which is my own empirical self, myself as question, knowing that in myself I also have Christ as answer. For the rest--I love the night silence, the early meditation and the moon, the reading and the breakfast coffee (or good tea!), sawing wood after sunrise, washing up, tired, as the sun begins to grow warm and the Atlanta plane goes over. Afternoon meditation slow--then work on the book (Conjectures)--office in the late afternoon, quiet supper, reading, walking, looking at the hills, the silence, the moon, the does, darkness, prayer, bed.
September 10, 1965, V.292-93
