getting started, or, don't try this at home

one never knows where the path will lead.

it is 6:00 in the morning on the third sunday of advent, still dark and eighteen degrees. i light a candle, pull a blanket around my shoulders, and begin morning prayer. "o lord, open thou our lips, and our mouths shall show forth thy praise." because it is advent, i start with venite (psalm 95:1-7, 96:9,13), which ends with
"for he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth,
and with righteousness to judge the world
and the peoples with his truth."

next, because it is the sixteenth morning of the month, follow psalms 79, 80, 81, beginning
"o god, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple
have they defiled, and made jerusalem a heap of stones."

psalm 81 concludes
"i would have fed them also with the finest wheat-flour;
and with honey out of the stony rock would i have satisfied them."

then comes a reading from isaiah, promising the desert will bloom (ch. 35), and because it is sunday, the te deum. the new testament reading describes the birth of john the baptist (luke 1:57ff), and by the time his father zecheriah is singing that
"the dayspring from high has visited us,
to give light to them that sit in the darkness, and in the shadow of death . . ."
a cold winter sunrise is reddening the south-east horizon, showing through my frosty plastic window a hundred-acre wood dusted with snow.

i sing christina rossetti's "in the bleak mid-winter" softly.

i am very cold, and most people would think me very alone, and i am very happy.

how did i get here? did the circling path that led to this cold hermit's morning begin the early fall morning my kayak took me around a bend of the st. francis river to find a huge bald cypress becoming dozens of great blue herons in the sunrise? yes.

did it begin the morning in the season of epiphany when i walked cautiously through the red doors of all saints' episcopal church to enter the daily office? yes.

or did it begin when i moved to santa fe to watch sunsets? yes.

by the grace of god when there has been a fork in the road, at least for the past thirty years, i have taken it. gradually the curves had led me back to the place where i had begun, to find it for the first time.

i began to notice what was happening, that i was becoming an accidental hermit, during a three-year long exploration of the waters of north-west washington and south british columbia in a red folding kayak named brendan. i cautiously cast off from a dock in anacortes one may morning, weighted down with all the gear the fear-and-gear mongers want to sell paddlers, and with the expectation of seeing a lot of beautiful "nature." three septembers later, i pulled up on an afternoon beach in bellingham, wearing only shorts, carrying a single cooking pot and a century-old copy of the holy bible, authorized version.

i knew i did not want to move back into a house, or to return to a career. as francis of assissi said, we do not live in houses. and as i've been told tom robbins said, " a career is a totally inadequate response to life. asked what i had learned, i was surprised to find the answer was easy. what i had expected to be many parts of nature had proved to be one whole creation.

a neighbor in the ozarks is shocked and a bit worried that i live without what she calls creature comforts, but i find that what i have found are the comforts of the creature, that, as annie dillard wrote, we are all created.

if you decide to take the path, do not expect it to lead to my little hut in the ozarks. do not be afraid that you will end up cold and alone on a snow morning. but do pay attention. what the holy one has in store for you is more than we can hope for or imagine.

pay attention. stay awake. put an axe in your television and watch the sunsets and the sunrises instead of listening to morning edition. sing with mary in the evening and zechariah in the morning instead of listening to mp3's. read the daily office instead of the new york times.

i'm alive serious here. there is a great pearl in that field, but if you are not willing to sell everything that you hve to buy it, you will die with the stuff for a good yard sale, but you will miss living in the kingdom of heaven.