More on the possibility of a monastery .

To live in healthy community.
To live together, under one roof, with men (and women – why not?) who find and build “home”.
To establish a refuge in which all the nonsense and the madness of the world is rectified through frequent sharing, thinking and discipline.
To be bound to the pursuit of what is really valuable and lasting.
To support each other without binding each other.
To grow together.
To age together.
To love together.
To die not alone.

Is it so far-fetched?
Imagine coming home to the monastery from a day’s work (and I don’t see why those of us with gainful employment outside the walls might not keep it), knowing that there will be food and relaxation and discussion and laughter and commiseration and rest and safety and love.

The house would have a pervasive peacefulness about it even when the “monks” were engaged in spirited conversation and celebration.

There would be no need for robes. We are not talking about “mouseketeers” or Shriners. There might be ceremony and ritual and music and art and writing of all sorts. There would be some rules, but only those that facilitated the common good.

Monks could be coupled or single or polyamorous. Contemplative or chatty. Industrious or reflective.

Each couple or single or polyamorous unit would have his/her/their own room. There would have to be plenty of bathrooms. One giant kitchen. One giant dining room for communal meals. Several gathering rooms. Some kind of central hall that would handle the convening of the entire community. I hesitate to call it a chapel because I don’t want to exclude those who while wrestling with the concept of God are not inclined to common prayer, but I would not exclude that possibility. And oh let there be a beautiful garden.

And let there be frequent visitors for we are folks who love the good company of lively people.

Sounds irresistible, and, some would say, impractical, but think of the community that already exists through this mechanism that we already share. Would this not be the next step?

I need to think more about this.

Look. Behind that door. That's where they live.

The author of the blog HT always makes his point in a thought provoking way. In his review of a travel book, The Way of the World by Nicholas Bouvier, he says the following:

I for one, in my travels, have missed the time when the world was still exotic. Everywhere I have been – Thai beaches, Himalayan foothills, Qinghai, Istambul – I seemed to arrive too late, in the wake of developers, cinder blocks, mass tourism, and the Coca-Cola Company...The world is becoming a less varied place, homogenized and less interesting.

This process starts at home (Think mainstreaming of gay culture/excavation of the underground. Think the exposure of privacies of any kind via the net.) and ends on those farthest flung beaches where we will always find the comfortable service of an ATM machine and the logos of our familiarity.

Heaventree, if all your energy goes into devouring the miles before you, into seeing all that can be seen, into learning the nuances of yet another dialect, into yearning to wear the feathers of some exotic creature not yet photographed, either death and infirmity will arrest you (unless, like a vampire, you are doomed unhappily to roam the streets of many centuries), or you will reach the end of all roads and find yourself back at your starting-line.

Instead, I will go to that one place for which there is no guide book and no translation. The one place for which I carry no currency. A place where the provocations buzz with static. Where transactions are still difficult. Where daily plans are upset by the eruption of the sudden coup breaking thin walls. I will turn and walk into my own head where the vistas are endless and the landmarks curious. I'll be leaving the door open behind me, but only a fool...

So this is what it means to seek the monastic. I think I have finally reached that point. I can think of nothing more satisfying than to establish a monastery in which men might live in common and in pursuit of all that is wonderfully unknown within them. Not the silly and caricatured monastery twisted with rules of celibacy and poverty and various worried controls, but one in which the communal life supports those interior journeys that only the luckiest among us ever finally make. First, I suppose I'd need a building. I wonder who'd be the first through the door with a suitcase?