The Place Where Time Stops.

Well, for me, this is the place where I stopped. This is where I spent five nights and days alone in the desert. After all that road-going, I think my time at Big Sur and the Desert House of Prayer were "slowing down" places, but here in this tent-ramada high on a mesa out in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona I really came to a complete standstill and in a quite exceptional way entered into the present moment as a way of daily living.

I have this theory that when you travel long distances in a short space of time there's a kind of "spiritual lag" whereby it takes a while for your spirit to catch up with your body - you know that feeling when you arrive somewhere and it takes a little time before you're "quite all there." When you do this over a protracted period of time the effect is even more pronounced - the sense of spirit-body disconnect is the only way I can think of expressing it. So at Cascabel (="rattlesnake") Hermitage I was able to stop and reconnect with myself, so to speak, with the flow of things from the outside world turned off for a while.


So what did I do for five days and nights? Well, as I say, the emphasis was not so much on doing as on being - sounds a bit of a cliche I know but that is how it was. How did I spend my time? Sounds a bit like a question Thomas Merton was asked once in terms of what was a typical day for him in response to which he wrote "Day of a Stranger." Really, life was stripped down to the bare necessities, as they say. I got up with the the sun (about 7am) and went to bed a little after sunset (by 7pm), so I slept a lot, though I also read a bit by flashlight or was happy to lie content with my thoughts. I had a simple breakfast (freeze dried scrambled egg and/or a banana plus good coffee, of course! "Don't tell me how good my coffee is..."), I prepared a simple meal before sunset using a single-burner propane camp-stove, and a snack at lunch-time usually down in the canyon. Apart from that I didn't do anything that had to be done.


Three days I hiked down off the mesa (like a plateau) into the canyon below. After about an hour up the canyon you come to a stream, water flowing in the desert, and as you hike further and further up it becomes more of a challenge to make your way, crossing the stream back and forth. This came to be a kind of physical meditation for me forcing me into the present moment, being present to the stream and the banks and the rocks - watching also for the unlikely at this time of year presence of a rattlesnake (didn't see one) or a gila monster.

I spent five nights and days not particularly thinking of the past or the future but being right there - of course memories came to mind, and thoughts of the future too, but I didn't dwell there. I didn't meditate formally very much though I tried to be consciously present which, as I say, wasn't hard to do in this place. I didn't do a lot of praying in a formal sense, though my heart was full of gratitude for each day and each moment, and I said many kyries (Lord have mercy!), and when people came to mind I found it to be a kind of prayerful reminiscence.

While I was at Cascabel I finished reading Ann Charters' biography of Jack Kerouac that I began reading, appropriately enough, in Lowell, Massachusetts, and that I've been reading on and off throughout this whole time. In many ways it is a sad tale as his life unravelled in his later years, and how the promise and exhuberance that is found in his writings met with dissolution and despair in his own life. I agree with Ann Charters though, that part of his genius at least was his ability to take the tragic material of his own life and creatively depict it in his writings - thinking particularly, for example, of the sorry tale of his "crack-up" that is related in Big Sur - somehow he was able to stand back from it and portray its reality with awful honesty. He was under no illusions. Perhaps there is redemption in this.

I've been conscious during this sabbatical journey that by coincidence I have reached the age Jack was when he died. I turned this age on February 17 (I originally thought it was January 19 when we left New York on the 60th anniversary of his journey, that would have been just too poetic but was actually a poetic miscalculation!). I'm now older than Jack. In one way this has no significance - we all get to the age of people who died younger than we shall - but doing so may give us cause to look at our own lives, both looking back and looking forward in terms of "How shall I spend the time that is left to me, be that long or short?" There are many ways we could answer this, but when the question came to mind that other evening as I sat looking at the sunset at Cascabel, two things immediately came into my head: practice kindness and do not fear.


So now I'm once more on the road en route back to the Californian coast and the New Camaldoli Hermitage at Big Sur where I'll get back into the rhythm of the daily liturgy of the monks based around the Psalms and begin the re-entry process for the next stage of life's journey...